TWiT 1068: Toto's Electrostatic Chuck - Is TikTok's New Privacy Policy Cause for Alarm?

16:17Leo Laporte:And that's the part that sucks, because I know for a fact that he's probably technically not even in that camp. But, I mean, he has personal things that are completely against the administration. But he got to make the company afloat. He got to take it to stockholders. The thing that's upsetting me about the gambling thing right now is they are preying on the people who feel that the financial situation is never going to get better. And whenever the financial situation doesn't get better, people try to take gambles. Now, these gambles are talking about they got dumb stuff like who's going to win the next presidential election?

16:50Leo Laporte:You know, we haven't even picked candidates yet, but they got like, you know, J.D.

16:53Ant Pruitt:Vance versus Gavin Newsom. You want a dumb one? Betting that Taylor Swift will be pregnant by March is one of the big.

16:59Leo Laporte:saw that one so because i want to i wanted to say kelsey oh my god uh they they heavily advertise on ig so if you're on ig you see this stuff and i'm like yo these bets are super stupid but the thing is and and coming from being basically been you know east coast in the hood at the time when the money gets bad people start doing quote unquote illegal things to try to get the money. Then the Reagan administration decided to lock all of us up for it, right? While, you know, Tom Cruise gets caught with a little small bag of, you know, booger sugar and he goes to rehab. Take that same booger sugar and turn it into crack, which is one-tenth the amount and put it in the hands of somebody on my side of the fence and it's 20 years automatically.

17:46Ant Pruitt:Yeah, that's right.

17:47Leo Laporte:And so they're preying on people being down in their money right now. And this is no different than And what the crack situation was back in the day, it just doesn't seem as painful. But trust you me, it's painful. There are kids right now that are wasting their college fund. There are parents right now that are taking wild swings and they're losing. And yeah, it's not only is it addictive, it's highly destructive. And then you know what you do to recover your money after this? You call the local person in your neighborhood that knows how to get money the way my neighborhood got money. And then you get worse in debt.

18:22Ant Pruitt:Yep.

18:23Leo Laporte:and the vig kills you 100 is that this is really bad yeah it's gonna it's gonna ruin lives and

18:31Ant Pruitt:and the the push i thought this was gonna be a nice upbeat way to start the show

18:36Leo Laporte:i don't think you have the right guests for like the super upbeat show

18:42Ant Pruitt:it's not even about the guests this is literally gambling like there's no discussion but the only reason this isn't a bigger deal is that there are other much bigger deals uh you know in in the world this is the secret it's it's it's crap all the way down and uh it's very clear that a lot of this is that putin style flood the zone where if you if you spew a huge amount of uh crap people you know we can only take so much at some point people just go i give up and they turn out and that's Of course, that's the best possible thing that could happen.

19:19Leo Laporte:I hear so many of my friends with the I give up language. And I'm like, no, please don't go to here. Like, I don't even like your take on it, but please don't give up. Honestly, I think it's fine to give up.

19:29Ant Pruitt:I think it's fine to give up because you're going to ruin your mental health. Well, that's why you want to give up. I can't sleep.

19:37Leo Laporte:You want to give up. I can't sleep. I bought three bottles of Japanese whiskey back from Japan. I'll see you. That helps.

19:46Ant Pruitt:But like give up on the constant barrage. Just watch the news from a channel. You know, France 24 has an English channel. Just watch the news once a day from France 24. Read a reputable newspaper and then vote when it's time to vote. That's the important thing. Like, you're not going to, you know, you're not going to change things or understand things better by watching the constant barrage of news of either the news, you know, 24 hours news networks or the TikToks and shorts or whatever that will serve you the most outraging, enraging. up and we have a um we have an elderly parent who doesn't consume mainstream news but subscribes to 300 newsletters and gets much of their news from a brazilian kind of nutty brazilian newsletter and the problem is it's so easy now thanks to ai and thanks to the internet to create a huge amount of disinformation and i think uh i don't i don't blame this relative uh because he's grown up he's an older fellow his whole life that well you trust what you read right these are these are you know we trusted the new york times and nbc and cbs and when uncle walter said something walter cronkite we we we took that as gospel and so you have that in your head well this i'm reading it must be true so i don't blame them for this let me ask you alex because you you are an expert on security um and i'm very relieved that you think the elections that elections fair elections can happen one of the strengths a weird strength the united states is that um our elections are run by the states so there's 50 different local governments that run the elections very hard to steal a national election.

21:52Right.

21:53Leo Laporte:There's over 10 ,000 actually election authorities in the right.

21:56Ant Pruitt:Because yeah, not just the states, the counties, right? It's local. Yeah. Don't, don't you just need to steal like four country counties though to swing it. So, so tell me, Alex, reassure us that it's, it would be very difficult to steal an election.

22:12Leo Laporte:It's extremely difficult to steal an election, which is why the election was not stolen in 2020 and why it was not stolen in 2024.

22:18Ant Pruitt:There is some feeling that it might have been. I mean, Trump did say, well, we got the swing states handled. Elon's going to handle that.

22:25Leo Laporte:Yeah.

22:27Ant Pruitt:That scared me a little bit.

22:29Leo Laporte:This is what drives you nuts. There's a whole set of like Democratic influencers who like to, you know, push this idea that Trump stole it. That is not possible. Donald Trump did not steal it either. Right. Like it is it is extremely hard in the modern era. It would be it is effectively impossible to steal a U.S. election. What is possible, it would be possible to cause chaos. Right. And it certainly would be possible for the president of the United States to cause chaos. And to create that and to create a situation where you can certainly create a situation where the election is unfair.

23:05Ant Pruitt:Right. Where people or maybe more to the point, believed to be unfair. Right. that's the real issue you know is what people believe right but actually changing the votes

23:15Leo Laporte:would be extremely hard just laid out right so in the united states uh we now have moved as of now so this wasn't totally true in 2020 although one of the saving graces is by 2020 none of the swing states were using direct recorded entry electronic voting right so nobody none of the swing states was it that when you pushed a button on electronic voting machine did that machine store your vote There were people who touched a touchscreen, but then what it did was recorded it. That was a ballot marking device. You want something that's a paper trail that can be audited after the fact, right? So now we have, for the vast majority of people, vote on hand marked paper ballots with the option of people can touch a machine.

23:57Leo Laporte:This is mostly for people, for either who need a language that is not supported in the place where they're voting, or they have a special accessibility need, such as they're blind or something like that. But then those are ballot marking devices. It will then print a paper ballot. Those ballots are then counted usually by machines. But then we have what are called risk limiting audits in every all 50 states. So this is what this is what gets hard is hard to explain this statistic, things like statistics to normal folks.

24:26Ant Pruitt:But this is the expertise of your former colleague, Chris Krebs, right? This is why Chris Krebs in 2020 said this was one of the fairest elections.

24:35Leo Laporte:He said it was the most secure election that had ever been held, which is true because by 2020, CISA had been created, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was the consolidation of a bunch of different security groups in DHS into one agency. Now, CISA can't actually do security for all the different parts of the election, but what they did do was support all of the different counties and states. And in doing so, they did penetration tests. They did code reviews of the code. They did work with the people who build all this stuff. And then they ran a center that pulled in information from the NSA and FBI, shared threat information back out to the states and counties.

25:15Leo Laporte:And then if anything bad happened, helped do very rapid investigations. Is that all still in place? No, that's all been torn down. All of that capability has been destroyed. The people have been fired from CISA.

25:30Ant Pruitt:There's been an active attempt to undermine that security.

25:34Leo Laporte:Yes. Pretty much anybody who did that work has been effectively called like a traitor or has been said that they. Chris Kress. Like Chris. So unfortunately, President Trump signed an executive order that explicitly called out Chris and said that Chris's clearance need to be revoked. His clearance was revoked. they took away his TSA pre-check in his global entry, which is kind of -

25:59Ant Pruitt:That's nutty.

26:00Leo Laporte:I mean, it's like kind of talk about some petty fascism. But then what is not petty is an ordered for him to be investigated, which is basically a bill of attainder, which is something that is so unconstitutional it's mentioned in our constitution as not being allowed twice. So anyway, Chris and a number of other people worked very hard in 2020 and not him, but other people worked in 2024 to keep the election secure. A bunch of those people have been fired, but still there are people in the states and localities who have that muscle memory who will be doing this in 2026 and 2028. It's just basically impossible to straight up steal an election.

26:40Leo Laporte:But I think the fear though, is if you have kind of armed men in the street, if you have riots, if you have tear gas, then people won't go out to vote. Right? So that's different. That's different than like, you know, stuffing ballot boxes. It's different than changing the vote totals, which, again, is effectively impossible at scale. But what you could do is try to suppress voting.

27:04Ant Pruitt:Part of the problem also is that our elections are very close and they have been for decades. And the closer the election, the smaller the amount of leverage you need to exert to change an election.

27:16Leo Laporte:yeah and and the other other issue that everybody's always afraid of is the uh as everybody here knows is you know actually the americans voting for our president directly it was not how we did it right like george washington was not elected by the american people he was elected by the the first continental congress um and you know that then uh persisted in the creation of the constitution in 1792 and such um and that you know congress came together and put you know the electoral college and such. And so the direct election of the Electoral College was something that was kind of, you know, added on later.

27:50Leo Laporte:And so we have these weird systems for like, hey, if the states can't figure out who their electors are, what do we do? And this ended up in, I think it was 1873, in this really bizarre, it's only happened once in our history, but this really bizarre outcome where then the House of Representatives effectively had to decide who the president was going to be, and that's what ended reconstruction after the Civil War and ended up being really bad for our country in a number of ways. And so I think that's one of the real fears is if you cause enough chaos, if you cause lawsuits in every single state that you're able to throw it to the House of Representatives, which then does not vote based upon the population, it votes, each state votes as a block.

28:39Leo Laporte:And it's just a bizarre part of our constitution that should not be written the way it is. And it's only worked that way once. And that would be an extremely undemocratic and an outcome that would not be accepted, I think, by a huge number of the American people.

28:55Ant Pruitt:Well, I'm just - I kind of wish you had stopped that. It's impossible to steal the election like 10 minutes ago. That's it. That's it. It's going to be fine. It's going to be fine. What's interesting, of course, Patrick, is that the rest of the world cares very much what happens here this impacts everybody it's not just us yeah yeah yeah of course I mean we were talking just before the show I was saying that when we were thinking that I I think the if we were to vote on what is it Kelsey or polymarket like is the American military actually going to enter Greenland's, you know, not space, but territorial waters, it would probably be relatively low, but we can't act like it's impossible.

29:50Ant Pruitt:Right. So obviously we think about it, we talk about it. One of the ways you keep that probability low is by being strong. I mean, this is the lesson learned in World War II.

29:59Leo Laporte:26 % right now will the US acquire part of Greenland. So if you want to.

30:04Ant Pruitt:That's pretty low. I mean, that's surprisingly low. It is not going to happen. It will be World War III before that.

30:11Leo Laporte:If you believe it, you can put your money where your mouth is right now. But then what would you spend it on?

30:15Ant Pruitt:Start gambling. Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't have it. But so, you know, it's things like we start talking about the fact that you should have a rechargeable AM radio just in case. I mean, this is not just for. Was this what people in France were doing? they were they were no it's me it's me and my my nerdy tech friends but we realize we realize that you know we don't have copper cables for uh phone lines anymore we don't have tvs with uh antennas to get the news so if something happens it's not just you know an open conflict with the united states but if there's whatever something happens if there's a bomb if there's anything um you can't do you get get communications with anyone so you you probably do need an am radio to at least get some information about what's happening but more seriously and more tech related um i think what a lot of people have been thinking about is that we need at least failovers like backups on um the all the systems that we use that are provided by uh american companies like uh you know microsoft Google, Apple, everything.

31:27Ant Pruitt:And so even if you don't switch everything over to, let's say, Proton or one of those, I think a lot of people, especially in infrastructure and critical infrastructure, they will switch over. But a lot of companies might want to have a system ready to go up very quickly if things go bad, because even if there isn't an armed conflict, if at some point something happens and the American, you know, the Trump administration decides American companies can't do business with France or some of them, or it's very unlikely, but if it happens, then you're in deep doo-doo. So you need to be ready. And that's the kind of thing that we wouldn't even have like considered a year ago.

32:17Ant Pruitt:It would have been like pure fantasy. And now we're, you remember what happened with the International Court of Justice. And what was the name of the gentleman? He had his Outlook email revoked. Oh, yes. After the investigation. That's right. It was Microsoft's servers. Yeah. Right. And so that was a shock in Europe. It was like, okay, then it can happen. And we can't be using American services for critical infrastructure. So I think relatively quietly, a lot of administrations have been slowly moving towards either open source or European based services. Headline in Friday's Wall Street Journal, Europe prepares for a nightmare scenario.

33:12Ant Pruitt:The U.S. blocking access to tech. Yeah. Trump's Greenland threats inject urgency into regions' efforts to reduce its reliance on American technology.

33:22Leo Laporte:If there's anybody who blocks it, it's actually most likely to be the European Commission, right? Because we're actually in this weird legal place post the Schrems II decision by the European Court of Justice, where there's supposed to be an agreement between the European Commission and the United States that was negotiated by the Biden administration, And then the Trump administration just kind of dropped it a little bit. And so there's the tech industry is and this precipice where, you know, the Trump administration is supposed to be, you know, at the same time, there's just be fair dealings of saying, yes, we will respect the privacy of Europeans and we will help American companies do that by agreeing to a set of rules by which we will respect the privacy of European citizens.

34:12if it sits in American data centers, we're also threatening to invade Greenland.

34:17Leo Laporte:And so all you need is for the European Commission to effectively just not agree to this new privacy agreement between the United States and the EC, and the European Court of Justice will just wipe out the word called standard contractual clauses. And all of a sudden, the European subsidiaries of Microsoft and Google and every other American company will no longer be able to do data transfers into the United States. And so that will have the effect of basically cutting off European companies from using the American cloud.

34:53Ant Pruitt:Let me take a break and then we'll talk about TikTok because the deal went through and maybe didn't work out quite like everybody thought it might work out. We have a really perfect panel for this. I got to tell you, it's so good to have Patrick Beja visiting us from the EU. And if he suddenly disappears, we'll know something horrible has happened. No, no. He's actually just getting better from the flu. And it's late at night in Paris. And we're going to try to keep this from being a four-hour episode just for you, Patrick.

35:27Leo Laporte:Yeah, right.

35:28Ant Pruitt:Yeah, right.

35:28Leo Laporte:We've gone through two stories. So we're totally different. I know. We're not moving exactly at the pace I was hoping.

35:34Ant Pruitt:That's Alex Stamos. Great to have you, Alex. You know, these are important things, though. I don't want to give them short shrift. So I really appreciate it. Alex's new job as chief product officer at Carter.dev, a firm that is much needed these days, helps AI developers create secure code. And I'm going to sign up for it and have it run on my GitHub repos and see where I went wrong. Because I've been doing a lot of vibe coding lately. I've been loving it. I've been loving Cloud Code. I actually ended up doing the Mac subscription just so I could have more tokens and more credits. And it's really, I think we're entering into a world of hyper-personalized software.

36:16Ant Pruitt:It's very interesting to me. We'll talk about that a little bit. Also with us, Mr. Aloha himself, Doc Rock. Thank you. YouTube.com slash Doc Rock. He's on the opposite side of the world, actually, from Patrick. So as Patrick's entering the early morning hours, you're just entering the afternoon. Yep, one o 'clock almost. That's nice. it's nice great to have all three of you our show today brought to you by threat locker i'm very excited uh steve gibson and i are going to be heading to orlando for threat locker zero trust world we've got a deal on tickets i'll tell you more about that in just a second but let's let me first tell you why you want to know about threat locker you know ransomware is just devastating businesses worldwide threat locker can stop it before it starts and because it's Zero Trust.

37:04Ant Pruitt:Zero Trust is remarkable. Recent analysis from ThreatLocker shows how a single ransomware operation, Chi Lin, surged from 45 incidents a couple of years ago to 800 incidents last year. It'll probably double again next year, this year. That's why you need ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker's Zero Trust platform takes a proactive, and these are the three words, the key three words, deny by default approach to block every unauthorized action. If you don't specifically say, yes, this can happen, it won't happen. That protects you from both known and unknown threats. Threat Locker's innovative ring fencing constrains tools and remote management utilities so attackers cannot weaponize them for lateral movement or the mass encryption they need for ransomware.

37:56Ant Pruitt:ThreatLocker works in every industry. It works on PCs and Macs. They've got US-based support that's phenomenal, 24-7. And this is kind of cool. It's just, I think, in a way, a side effect of zero trust because you know nothing can happen unless you authorize it. It means you have comprehensive visibility and control. You have a record of everything that's happened, right? Listen to some of the people using ThreatLocker. Emirates, flight catering. This is a global leader in the food industry, 13 ,000 employees. They cannot afford to be down for one minute. ThreatLocker gave full control of apps and endpoints, improved Emirates catering's compliance, and delivered seamless security with strong IT support.

38:42Ant Pruitt:The CISO of Emirates flight catering said this, quote, the capabilities, the support, and the best part of ThreatLocker is how easily it integrates with almost any solution. Other tools take time to integrate with ThreatLocker. It's seamless. That's one of the key reasons we use it. It's incredibly helpful to me as a CISO. Any enterprise that can't afford to be hit by ransomware, I guess that's everybody, but can't afford even to be down for a minute, can benefit from ThreatLocker. JetBlue uses ThreatLocker. They have to fly, right? Heathrow Airport, which has in the past had problems. They've turned to ThreatLocker now to make sure that the airport operations are flawlessly continuously available.

39:21Ant Pruitt:The Indianapolis Colts use ThreatLocker, the point of Vancouver. I go on and on. ThreatLocker consistently receives high honors, industry recognition from G2 for High Performer and Best Support for Enterprise in the Summer 2025. Ratings peer spot ranked ThreatLocker number one in application control. GetApp's Best Functionality and Features Award in 2025. Find out more about ThreatLocker. Go to threatlocker.com slash twit. Get a free 30-day trial. Learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. ThreatLocker.com slash twit. I am excited. We're going to go to Zero Trust World, their annual conference.

39:58Ant Pruitt:It's in Orlando this March. And if you want to come out and see Steve and me, we're going to do a special presentation on the first day of the event. We've got for a limited time, a special offer code for you. ZTWTwit26. That's Zero Trust World, ZTWTwit, This Week in Tech, 26. You'll save$200 off registration for Zero Trust World 2026. We'd love to see you. You'll get access to all sessions. You'll get hands-on hacking labs, meals. There is an after party that's legendary. The most interactive hands-on cybersecurity learning event of the year. It's March 4th through the 6th in Orlando. Be sure to register with our code ZTWTwIT26 and we will see you in orlando and thank you red locker for supporting the show so this week uh it became official uh china and u.s have signed off on this u.s spinoff china still has 29.9 percent of the company that's the maximum a foreign entity can have ownership of um the rest is owned by oracle silver lake michael dell uh the united arab emirates their uh mgx is their state-owned investment firm based on ai susquehanna i think that's the that's jeff voss who's a big trump donor i think one of the real reasons that the whole throw tiktok out of the united states didn't happen because voss had a huge percentage of tick tock and i don't think he wanted to lose his money dragoneer uh this meets the the final deadline the extension which has been going on since the law requiring tick tock to be sold was passed and signed into law in 2024 the supreme court affirmed it um no one knows how much was paid.

41:54Ant Pruitt:It's not clear. But I did note that as soon as I signed into TikTok, I got new end user agreement that I had to agree to. So I didn't and I deleted it. Some people say it's actually for one of the things that they asked for is more specific location information. Look, we were worried about the Chinese having that right now. They're being, they're even more granular. They're having minute to minute location information. That was the thing that stopped me. They also said TikTok could collect information, including your sex life, your sex orientation, your status as a transgender or non-binary citizenship and immigration status.

42:46Ant Pruitt:now lawyers have said that that's to comply with california's consumer privacy act because now it's a u.s entity they have to comply i i guess it was enough to scare me off

43:05Ant Pruitt:it's funny it's ironic because i honestly wasn't worried about the chinese knowing my immigration status i'm much more worried about the u.s government knowing my immigration status and i'm a citizen but apparently that's not sufficient anymore um what do you what do you think doc rock are you going to continue do you do stuff on tiktok i you know it's really crazy as i recently

43:26Leo Laporte:just started doing stuff on tiktok because you know there's a lot of activity happening over there and yeah this is sketchy this is what's funny is that i'm only not that person you can't get past

43:41Ant Pruitt:the agreement to cancel your account you have to agree to it before you can cancel your account so i just checking to see if i had the pop-up i didn't get the pop-up yet but i know some friends they got it yesterday oh i got immediately this is wild so um i declined and deleted it alex am i am i crazy i mean you we we were talking we've been talking about this for more than a year i remember when you were on you said yeah no tiktok is a threat is it is no it's no longer a threat yeah so um i okay so my position always was that of all the chinese companies tiktok was not never the the biggest threat um i've always been much

44:30Leo Laporte:more concerned about wechat uh because wechat actually can't use conversations that are important and it is very much not end-end encrypted. And there's evidence that the Ministry of State security effectively uses WeChat as a massive surveillance tool.

44:45Ant Pruitt:And most, there are very few Americans that use WeChat, but it is used by Chinese.

44:49Leo Laporte:A lot of Chinese Americans, a lot of Americans of Chinese ascent use it because if you have any family that speaks Chinese, you use WeChat. So it is used as a tool to kind of on the greater Chinese diaspora. But that being said, there was some risk from TikTok, but a lot of that risk had been pushed down a little bit through the mechanisms of Project Texas and the creation of this.

45:15Ant Pruitt:Oracle was hosting the data in the United States.

45:18Leo Laporte:TikTok, US Data Security, LLC. Yeah, exactly. And so there's a lot of things to say here. One, there was a law. That law was just straight up ignored, right? The Trump administration basically just said, you don't have to follow this law. There was no mechanism in that law.

45:33Ant Pruitt:Do you remember it was roughly a year ago, right before the inauguration, TikTok went offline.

45:38Leo Laporte:And that was what was supposed to happen because they were not following the law. There was a mechanism for one extension, I believe, to be given. But to do that, you had to have been on the verge of a deal. And the administration did not do any of the stuff they were supposed to do for that. So one, we just kind of just blew through the law. Like, laws don't matter. So that whole thing's been crazy. Second, this new entity, you know, some of these are just neutral. You know, I don't think Michael Dell has, like, that much of a political position. Silver Lake is just a neutral private equity firm.

46:17Leo Laporte:But some of these people are, you know, really political players who are directly aligned with the current administration.

46:25Ant Pruitt:And we know Larry Ellison is one of them.

46:28Leo Laporte:Yes. Who is absolutely like twisting, as we know, CBS in a political direction to make the president happy. And so in some ways, TikTok might be more of a threat, if not from a data perspective, from becoming a much more political platform. Now, I think that will, if that happens, that is going to backfire in crap. I mean, there's nobody who is more sensitive to being manipulated as a father of teenagers. The idea that you can think that you could try to manipulate 15-year-olds. If you're a middle-aged person, you're like, I'm going to manipulate that. The idea that Larry and David Ellison are going to be able to manipulate teenagers and get away with it is just ridiculous.

47:12Ant Pruitt:It's nervous-making given the current climate in the United States that they say, we will collect your immigration status?

47:18Leo Laporte:So, okay, so they're not directly collecting it. I think there's a couple of things going on here. One is when you're a social media company, one of the real challenges is that people upload everything. So I saw this at Facebook. I never worked for Meta, right? I was at Facebook. And Facebook, when I was there, got sued for all these situations where there'll be laws of like, you know, you have to protect this kind of data like pregnancy data. Okay. Did Facebook ever want to know people's pregnancy data? No. But there'd be things like SDKs that could get embedded in products. And then all of a sudden things like PHI would get uploaded.

48:00Leo Laporte:And that's just like an arbitrary text field. And all of a sudden it ends up in our database and we don't even know about it. But then the company gets sued and it is way easier to go to a jury of 12 people who can't get out jury duty and tell them big company bad, big company spying on pregnant women. And then the defense attorneys are like, no, this is an arbitrary text field. And it's a Jason field. And, you know, Facebook didn't know. Yeah, you're going to lose that trial.

48:25Ant Pruitt:So it's sensible if you're TikTok to have this. If you're the lawyers, it makes sense.

48:29Leo Laporte:Because like the law says, especially in California, that like these are the sensitive things. And so TikTok basically has to say, we might know these things about you because TikTok allows arbitrary stuff to be sent up.

48:43Ant Pruitt:Yeah.

48:44Leo Laporte:Now, the question is, is it smart for them to actually list these things because it's going to show up in a lawsuit later? Like this is this is where you get like the I think the tradeoff inside of social media companies between the lawyers and like product people where if you're a product person, you might be like, you know, could we just get away with saying, hey, you're sending us videos that might have anything in it. And if you tell us sensitive stuff, it's going to be in your data and we can't help that. Can we get away with that instead of listing all this stuff?

49:11Ant Pruitt:It's probably also why they fought the California Consumer Privacy Act, because they knew it would require this kind of language, right?

49:21Leo Laporte:Yeah, I don't think TikTok's actually tracking immigration status. I think they have overactive – they paid somebody$900 an hour to write this thing. And part of what they're doing is they're looking at every lawsuit against every other social media company for the last 20 years, and they're protecting against it. That being said, I think this whole TikTok thing is incredibly corrupt, right? Like, effectively, our government put a gun to the head of a foreign-owned corporation. I do not like the owners of that foreign-owned corporation. I am not a fan of the People's Republic of China. I have a child who is learning Chinese, and he has to go to Taiwan to do that because I have a file, probably, with the ministry.

50:05Leo Laporte:I know I have a file with the ministry.

50:06Ant Pruitt:He couldn't go there.

50:07Leo Laporte:Right. He can't go there.

50:08Ant Pruitt:So fine.

50:09Leo Laporte:Taipei's great. I want him to visit while it still exists. And so anyway, like I'm not a fan of the old owners, but we put a gun to the head and stuck them up and then transferred ownership of it to the political friends of the current administration. It's just straight up gangster capitalism.

50:27Ant Pruitt:It's the second part that's a problem. It's who it was transferred to. That's the problem. Because I think the issues that were listed with the Chinese ownership of TikTok were substantiateable. Like it's not maybe you could have discussed how real it was, but the question of especially maybe the data issue is a little bit overblown because data is being sold and bought in the US anyway. Our GPD is pretty cool. The issue of the influence with the algorithm, I think, is a very serious one. And the idea that a foreign entity is so embedded into the culture of another country that it could influence cultural trends and political decisions, I think is a serious security risk.

51:31Ant Pruitt:so transferring it transferring the ownership either i mean you could ban it or you could transfer it to a neutral party where you're a little bit more confident that it's not going to have this kind of undue algorithmic influence i think it makes sense the problem is who it was transferred to and the algorithm can be used to nefarious ends in that case as well i mean any political party cronies or friends of would have been a problem it turns out it's this one if we want to be a little bit more neutral for a second it turns out that this one it would have been a problem either way if it was another politically charged a group of people but the the the issue of the algorithmic influence is not to be discounted, I think.

52:27Ant Pruitt:And we can see it. I mean, we've seen it, I think it was last year, an article about Taiwan and how the youth in Taiwan is having its view of the Chinese model changed. It was a long article. I talked about it a few times, but it was influencing the way the youth in Taiwan is looking at China. And even it might be a little bit anecdotal, but I use TikTok quite a bit, and I've seen a significant amount of what is effectively Chinese propaganda, which is showing all the great things about China, you know, modern cities, modern, very technologically forward stuff, happy people dancing, singing, showing their cities with trains going through buildings and stuff like that.

53:28Ant Pruitt:That's awesome. You strangely never see anything negative about China on TikTok. Never, ever. and i have again this is very good i never have either you're right yeah but i've seen uh uh you know people going like you know china sounds cool yeah it sounds cool it's very i mean china is very cool uh there are some not cool parts of course um and but you you never hear about you know freedom of expression the uighur like never on tiktok and my point is that of course it's not there are a lot people who know about these things there are also a lot of people who might not as it's not that like it's going to go from zero percent to a hundred percent positive opinion but if you shift you know five percent ten ten percent opinion it it does something to the country right so well we don't have to worry about it very easy to discount that aspect of it and the algorithmic influence is not it should not be you know throw up thrown out um i feel bad because you know my as i've mentioned before my son uh basics his career on tiktok he's now on instagram as well and so is a little bit insulated against it but uh he still posts regularly on tiktok i you know i i don't like how i actually got rid of instagram too i think i just don't want to have either one of them foisting any point of view on me and x as well um i don't think you're the target true i mean x has become just terrible right it's just like race war every day right depending on i mean

55:12Leo Laporte:what drives me nuts is there's still like a group of ai there's a great ai stuff on x that's i kind of missed that but the political discussion has become just completely dominated by bots and plus elon forces every post of his threads sorry the alternative became threads and the funny thing about threads while they try to gain traction is there are so many posts which are just there to like absolutely rage bait you i mean like it's this isn't this social now yeah no but i mean it's the it's the odd it's the low-hanging fruit rage baits that you easily bite into because you think it's a real question and then sometimes you look at it go wait a minute this is this this question is so stupid this is actually put here just to get engagement bait so it's different from rage baiting.

55:57Leo Laporte:Let me put it that way. It's engagement baiting because I'm going to say something stupid so everybody can tell me that I did it wrong and you're getting engagement. And so that elevates those accounts. And so they keep going, keep going. And then all of a sudden they kick in the rage bait. So they are actually smart enough because they're building this sort of attention graph by saying dumb stuff. There are people, Leo, it's going to crack you up. There are people still arguing about how the magic mouse is terrible because you charge it from the bottom. And we all know that in the time that I've been having this freaking brain fart, I could have plugged in my mouse and got nine more hours of charge out of it.

56:37Leo Laporte:Literally in 90 seconds of charge, you can get a whole full day. So it was dumb, but it was never a real problem. You know what I mean? It's kind of like me. I'm dumb, but I'm not a real problem. And it's like both. You guys are still arguing about this, and it's hilarious. So if you just want to be entertained, you know, now the new thing on threads is how come all the 40 year olds are on threads? Oh, those are just great. And the comments are glorious. The best comment was, well, I'm here so I can show you how to spell 40 year olds because they did it wrong. On purpose. More than likely. Yeah.

57:12Ant Pruitt:You know, on X, if we go back to policy and European policy, a lot of people are calling for administration to leave X, which they haven't yet, because you need the audience that you're talking to. But a lot of people are, especially with the latest, you know, AI deepfakes and what's it called? Nudes. Oh, yeah, this has been a huge. And so a lot of people, but interestingly, an argument against Blue Sky was that if you try to talk about AI on Blue Sky, you get murdered. Right. And so as Alex was saying, if you want to have an interesting conversation about AI, you can't do it on Blue Sky. It's impossible.

58:06Ant Pruitt:Isn't that funny? You get pushed off the platform immediately.

58:10Leo Laporte:Yeah. I've tried to have conversations on Blue Sky, and it's like if you step off the orthodoxy, it becomes, you get dogpiled there too. I don't know. I try not to use social media too much anymore.

58:23Ant Pruitt:I think that's the bottom line. It's just get off of it.

58:26Leo Laporte:I'll do like long form stuff like this because you get to talk with nice people and you get to share. And if you disagree with somebody, you can try to play it out over five minutes and you don't have the context collapse that you do.

58:38Ant Pruitt:Right. Right. Well, you're talking to real people for one thing. Well, who knows who you're talking to on, on X? Yeah.

58:44Leo Laporte:And I think like that's, you know, somebody is going to create the 100 % real social network, right? Where, uh, you know, everybody has a verified identity and content is, is created on the device does not come from CapCut.

59:01Ant Pruitt:There is an argument though, for anonymized posting. For instance, there is an Instagram account, which ICE has been desperately trying to unmask, that posts videos of ICE arrests. And ICE wants this, you know, John Doe. And they've been turned down again and again. The courts have said no. Instagram has said no. There is an argument that sometimes you do need anonymity. So a fully real social network. I don't know. I mean, I would join it. I think it would be both. I think you absolutely do need anonymity. And those exist. And I'm very heartened. Yeah, they exist in spades right now. I'm very heartened to hear that Instagram has refused to identify the account.

59:52Ant Pruitt:I would have thought they would have folded. So I guess I'm wrong there. But a real social network. interestingly sam altman um saw this coming with do you know about the world you know world coin the orb right the iris orb he saw it coming but doesn't it And the fact that you're giving them your iris information, which is unchangeable. You're not giving it the idea.

1:00:23Leo Laporte:It's like you're verifying it. Like, he's right in that what you're going to do is you're going to have to push all this stuff into secure hardware that verifies you undead.

1:00:30Ant Pruitt:Yeah. But I think it's a brilliant idea because we do need authentication is the thorniest issue. It's the issue behind online voting. It's the issue behind shopping. It's the issue behind commerce. We often, you know, being able to authenticate reliably is a huge issue and unsolved at this point. Well, especially if we're talking about communication in an era of AI where you don't know what is being, if you don't know if what is being you're seeing is real or not. at least if you know it comes from someone who has identified themselves through, you know, world, like WorldCoin or something else, I think it gives credence to whatever you're seeing.

1:01:17Ant Pruitt:And the reason a lot of people are giving up at the moment, I think, on, you know, information or videos or the biggest problem with AI, I think, is that it's not that it's going to make people, we've talked about this a few times, but it's not that it makes people believe stuff that isn't true. It's that ultimately people who see stuff don't know whether it's true or not. So they're not going to trust the stuff that is true. And they're going to go like, oh, well, I don't know if it's true or not, whatever. And it doesn't matter. So if you get a social network or a way to engineer trust, I think that has value.

1:02:00Ant Pruitt:It doesn't mean that it fixes everything, but a social network where you know who you're talking to and you know that it's them and you trust them, it has value. Obviously, you know, it doesn't mean that everyone's going to trust everyone else. But I think it would be an interesting thing to try, at least. This is the story from Ars Technica. DHS keeps trying and failing to unmask anonymous ICE critics online. They had subpoenaed Meta to reveal the John Doe, who had an Instagram account and a Facebook account monitoring ICE in Pennsylvania. They sued the DHS. He countersued to block ICE from identifying him.

1:02:46Ant Pruitt:He says those summonses to Meta infringed on core First Amendment protective activity. DHS fought his motion to quash, but eventually gave in on the 16th. They abruptly reversed course and withdrew their summons from Meta. So that's where it stands right now. But I doubt that that will stay that way.

1:03:08Leo Laporte:Well, I'm glad to see. I mean, I know some of the people who used to have these fights and I know they're still at Meta. And so I'm glad to see there's still there's still some people there who are willing to have these fights. And a bunch of them are ex-DOJ folks. I know for a fact that they are very sad of what's happened to the Department of Justice.

1:03:27Ant Pruitt:Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's become a personal law firm for the presidency. We're going to take a break. Come back. Oh, I had one more stat just to give you. We were talking about the sexualized images on X, the Grok deep, non-consensual deep fake nudes. according to the new york times over nine days grok posted 4.4 million images of which at least 41 was sexualized images of women so that's two million images in nine days uh non-consensual sexualized images yeah so if you look deeper how many of other you know yeah

1:04:08Leo Laporte:a couple percent in at least a single digit percent look like they're underage which would make Grok one of the possibly the largest creator of AIC Sam now in history. I mean, this is, it's a fascinating outcome because, you know, I, at Stanford, we wrote a bunch of the first papers on the AIC Sam, uh, you know, back like 2021, 2022. And we saw this coming, but like where this was, was this all started basically stable diffusion, stable diffusion 1.5 had very few protections, but for people to take stable diffusion and then create AI CSAM required at least some skill, a bunch of people working together and stuff.

1:04:48Leo Laporte:And Grok made it super easy for folks.

1:04:51Ant Pruitt:It's interesting because this is the graph from the New York Times of the images created, just all of all images created per day by Grok. And you could see that there was a sudden explosion after Elon posted an AI edited photo of himself in a bikini. And then suddenly there's this explosion. And then of course it all ends when X limited the image creation to paid accounts on January 8th.

1:05:16Leo Laporte:Because you know what makes something really much more legal is if you charge people for it.

1:05:20Ant Pruitt:Yeah, right. Oh, now it's okay.

1:05:23Leo Laporte:Yeah.

1:05:23Ant Pruitt:You paid for it? Oh, well, go right ahead. Right.

1:05:27Leo Laporte:That's generally defense in court. Oh, no, we're profiting from this behavior. So now it should be okay.

1:05:35Ant Pruitt:Well, at least if it's paid, then they know who you are, right? So in theory, if you create something that is illegal, it's easier to find you. I'm really trying to, you know, play devil's advocate.

1:05:49Leo Laporte:Yeah, but the problem is, is the person committing the crime is actually Grok, is actually XAI. Is it? Yes, XAI is the generator here. They do not have Section 230 protection.

1:06:01Ant Pruitt:Oh, interesting. They do not.

1:06:02Leo Laporte:No, they are the one who is now.

1:06:07Ant Pruitt:But an AI can't have a copyright, can't be like the person – are you sure it's not the person legally that is like writing the prompt? So this is now what will be litigated.

1:06:19Leo Laporte:This will be fascinating. Because there's a civil issue. And civilly, I am sure XAI has a huge problem. Now, what they're trying to do is they're trying to get all these cases removed to Texas, to one district in Texas, where there's only like one judge and he is a Tesla shareholder and will not recuse himself from cases. So that is super controversial, right? So like Elon's baby mama sued him in the northern district of Texas. Oh, that's right. Or northern district of California. And he's trying to remove it under their terms of service. So that is like super controversial of can you use terms of service even though the actual harm happened elsewhere.

1:06:59Leo Laporte:So that's a big legal fight. But then the second issue will be there's significant civil issues, but this is a crime, right? And the criminal issues here are very interesting.

1:07:12Ant Pruitt:Has there been any criminal prosecution though? No.

1:07:14Leo Laporte:There have been criminal prosecutions of people for AICSIM. They are few and far between because what happens is that the vast majority of cases where people get caught with AI CSAM, they have real CSAM on their drives. And for the most part, prosecutors.

1:07:27Ant Pruitt:So they don't have to go after the AI part. Yeah.

1:07:29Leo Laporte:So the vast majority of child exploitation cases are pled out. Right. It almost never goes to trial because the evidence is strong and the penalties are huge. And so the lawyers tell the.

1:07:44Ant Pruitt:Just plead out.

1:07:45Leo Laporte:Perps just plead out.

1:07:46Ant Pruitt:You're in trouble.

1:07:47Leo Laporte:Right. Like instead of taking 20 years or whatever, 30 years, get your 18 months or two years and, you know, take it. There have been a couple of cases, but it's complicated. And the legality issues here are complicated. I'm going to give a shout out to my former Stanford colleague who's still at Stanford. Rhianna Fevricorn has written a number of pieces on this because the laws around it are different and they all actually rest on a Supreme Court precedent called the Ashcroft case. So it tells you how old it is, which is about can photos that are not, can images that are not real be count as effectively child pornography, right?

1:08:34Leo Laporte:And it's a fast, it turns out to be like a really fascinating, interesting issue. And so this will end up being litigated, and it probably will end up going back to the Supreme Court, because none of the case law, you know, all the case law predates diffusion models, right? Like deep learning upsets all of this. And like, you know, you're talking about images that are not real, but they're based upon real folks. In this case, we're talking about images where you start with the real image, but you're modifying it. So they are the faces of real women and real girls, but then they're modified using diffusion models.

1:09:09Leo Laporte:So it's super complicated. But who is the one who's going to be punished is a big question, both criminally and civilly. But there is no, what we know for sure is multiple courts have ruled that AI companies do not have Section 230 exemptions here because, one, of the criminal side, but also they are not just posting content. X is not just posting content that was created by somebody else. They are creating the content themselves.

1:09:36Ant Pruitt:Oh, very interesting. Yeah, because X is now owned by XAI. Yes.

1:09:41Leo Laporte:Very interesting. It is going to be a big deal. They really screwed up here. This will last for a long time, And these cases are going to last a lot longer than the Trump administration. There's also these cases are going to happen in states, right? So that'll happen in state court. They'll try to remove it to federal court, move it to Texas. They're not going to be, you got a bunch of state attorney generals. And so what's happened is X has opened themselves up to a bunch of state attorney generals who do not like Elon Musk. And so that was not a good move. And the civil side is going to be on par with, you know, someone trying to go after, say, Colt or Sig Sauer, whatever, after some sort of, you know, weaponry incident.

1:10:22Leo Laporte:You know, the civil side, they go out to the man. Did the gun commit the crime? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was trying to use that word. It also might lead, in Europe, it's become a big deal. Ofcom in the UK might completely ban X. But it's also reasonable because the nudifier apps, we've seen them get banned by Apple. Right. Google. Why didn't Apple and Google ban X? Or at least Grok, right?

1:10:45Ant Pruitt:I mean, we all know why.

1:10:48Leo Laporte:We know why, because they're afraid of Elon and they're afraid of him calling Trump and then having Apple and Google punished.

1:10:54Ant Pruitt:But like, you know, I think it's important to say, because I see a lot of people say, oh, but why didn't Tim Cook? And why didn't Sundar Pichai? And like, we know why. And that's what those articles mean. Elizabeth Lopato and the Verge called them cowards they said yeah they're cowards is why but it is you're right we should lay out here that

1:11:17Leo Laporte:this company like we thought this was a line that could not be crossed and this line was crossed

1:11:22Ant Pruitt:apparently according to uh bad rod in our discord our club to discord even text and hand-drawn images can be considered c sam under canadian law so in that i'm not the canadian law informs american law but that's interesting you can have a hand-drawn image that would still be considered

1:11:39Leo Laporte:see sam well even the text part you know because i guess a lot of the uh this well when you hear it all the time on the news or when you watch um my dude from uh nbc catch a predator back in the day um it would be the text messages right it would be the chat that would get a lot of guys in trouble so if if texts count and that means you know electronic text as well as handwritten text

1:12:02Ant Pruitt:um yeah that that sounds like logical i guess i was on the jury for one of those uh to catch a predator cases uh he got in a lot of trouble for entrapment though and i don't that's exactly what happened you never heard a second i sat through the whole testimony of the prosecution uh then the defense goes to the judge and says your honor there's an entrapment and the judge throws it out says to the jury never mind after two weeks of testimony we went home uh but i agreed with the judge the whole time i'm thinking this this poor kid was completely entrapped yeah for the for the show nonetheless i mean it's not saying for the purposes of television entertainment yeah

1:12:42Leo Laporte:some of it got elevated because of television entertainment because there was no child involved

1:12:46Ant Pruitt:ever it was an adult uh who was yeah anyway it was yeah it was interesting it's my only time i ever served on jury and i thought it was a fascinating story hey we got to take a break because poor patrick is just never going to make it to four in the morning so

1:13:02Leo Laporte:no sleep till

1:13:09Ant Pruitt:that'll perk you up that'll perk you up uh alex stamos who i had no idea was a was a big fan of rap uh is here he's the chief product officer at quarter.dev of course he is of course he is you're that generation it just blows me away you know because as an old man i always think the rap generation is young people but that's not anymore um anil dash was good we had anil dash on the show he was going to the uh the last performance of uh uh the wu-tang clan wow you're hip yeah that's i mean how old are the beastie boys like exactly right exactly it's those are oldies now oh yeah patrick beija not an oldie a a young man in an old man's body how about that let's go with that okay from not patrick.com and doc rock always a pleasure to have the doctor good doctor on from youtube.com slash docrock and ecamm our show today brought to you by meter meter was started by two network engineers who felt your pain who felt your pain if you're a network engineer they know how difficult it is they decided to be the company building better networks full stack full stack if you're a network engineer you know all of the you know the pain points legacy providers, inflexible pricing, IT resource constraints stretching within.

1:14:33Ant Pruitt:No IT department ever got enough money to do their job right. Complex deployments, fragmented tools. You're mission critical to the business. Let me reassure you, but you're working with infrastructure that just wasn't built for today's demands. Well, Meter knows that too. And that's why businesses are switching to Meter. Meter delivers full stack networking infrastructure. Wired? Yes. Wireless? Yes, even cellular that's built for performance and scalability and built to handle the most challenging environments. Meter designs their own hardware. They realize we've got to do it from scratch. We've got to design the hardware.

1:15:11Ant Pruitt:We've got to write the firmware. We've got to build the software. We have to manage the deployments. And they even provide aftermarket support, after sales support. Meter offers everything. They'll even do ISP procurement for you. They'll do all the security, the routing, the switching. they'll do wireless firewall cellular they'll do the power right that's just as important isn't it dns security vpn sd win multi-site workflows all in a single solution from a company that cares meters single integrated networking stack scales they work in major hospitals and you know what a hostile environment for wireless a hospital can be if you've ever been in a hospital the phone never works branch offices warehouses it's really often the case i was talking to meter a couple of weeks ago and uh they said you know we often get calls from companies that acquire another business they get these new these warehouses with old stacks that you know hostile wireless environments and they have to then incorporate it into their own existing systems they're great for this they They can do it for large campuses.

1:16:18Ant Pruitt:They even do it for data centers. Reddit uses Meter. That should tell you something. The assistant director of technology for Webb School of Knoxville, he said he had an interesting challenge. We had more than 20 games on campus between our two facilities, each game streaming via wired and wireless connections. All at once, that event went off without a hitch. We could never have done this before Meter redesigned our network. with meter you get a single partner for all your connectivity needs from your first site survey to ongoing support without the complexity of managing multiple providers multiple tools you know you know how it is they you say i'm having a problem here the isp says what's your router the router company says what's your isp no no you don't have to worry about that it's an integrated networking stack meter is designed to take the burden off your it team and still give you deep control and visibility, reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online.

1:17:18Ant Pruitt:Meter is a modern company built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow. We thank Meter so much for sponsoring. Go to meter.com slash twit to book a demo now. That's meter.com slash twit to book a demo. I was so impressed with these guys. And the founder's story is amazing. They know what it's like. And they came up with a great solution. meter.com slash twit. We thank them so much for their support. A big story coming out this week about Microsoft. The FBI said, we want the BitLocker keys for an investigation, and Microsoft provided them. When asked, Microsoft says, we get about 20 requests for BitLocker keys every year.

1:18:07Ant Pruitt:We'll provide them to the governments in response to governments, plural, in response for valid court orders. Now, I think you might have thought, I certainly thought that BitLocker, which is full disk encryption, was, you know, mine and mine alone. And it used to be, if you, and in fact, it was one of the hazards of BitLocker that it was certificate-based. If you created the certificate and didn't save it, that you would not be able to access your data ever again. Microsoft solved that by saying, well no you have to have a microsoft account and we'll keep the keys for you so they have the keys uh early last year the fbi served microsoft with a search warrant asking it for recovery keys to unlock encrypted data stored on three laptops federal investigators in guam felt uh that they could they held evidence it would help prove individuals handling the island's covid unemployment assistance program were part of a larger plot to steal funds microsoft complied i'm sure this was no surprise to you alex and probably isn't a surprise to anybody who thinks about it should i worry about my uh my file i was like you leo i thought i thought it was i thought it was private right but but i actually don't have a problem with this because you have the option to not you don't have to your certificate with yeah with microsoft if you want to keep it all local and you know run the risk of losing your access to your data then you can't so when i first read the headlines i was like what you can they have the key what and i was like ready to be very upset at american companies again but then i became reasonable and read the article and realized that you can decide what but the default is that they are uploaded and And Microsoft's made harder and harder to install Windows without a Microsoft account.

1:20:03Ant Pruitt:So there's definitely impetus in that direction. I think it's important for people to know it.

1:20:07Leo Laporte:I'm not so cool with it for a couple of reasons. So one is Microsoft has pushed the Microsoft account idea very hard. And they have made it basically impossible to install Windows 11 without creating an online account. They suck a huge amount of data out of Windows. It used to be any normal person could install Windows with just a local account. And then you could add a what used to be called the live.com account and now like an online Microsoft account. And then they made it that it was required. But nerds could basically pop up a window and you could run like a command and do it. They've turned that off.

1:20:48Leo Laporte:And so now, like, if you want to do it without an account, you effectively have to make a special version of the ISO. You have to patch out their code and basically tell it it's like an enterprise install to do only a local.

1:21:04Ant Pruitt:You could do it with Rufus. There's some tools. Yeah, basically.

1:21:06Leo Laporte:Yeah. So and by default, like you said, they will back up your key for you. So you can go log in and grab the key. If they wanted, they could do what Apple does, which is effectively use like a Apple uses HSMs to store the backup keys and then use a mechanism to make it very hard. Apple does not have the ability then to recover those keys.

1:21:37Ant Pruitt:So I don't have to worry with FileVault, Apple's encryption, which is, by the way, on on default on all Apple devices. is, A, Apple doesn't require you to make an Apple account to use a Mac or an iPhone.

1:21:48Leo Laporte:Right. And they also make it explicit to be able to unlock your device when you do it. And then Apple makes it very difficult for themselves to recover that key. Now, that being said, Apple does store a bunch of data when you do an iCloud backup in a way that the FBI can get to.

1:22:05Ant Pruitt:We've seen that. We've seen that in court filings. Yes.

1:22:08Leo Laporte:And so Apple is not perfect here. That is a decision they have made. that is mostly about having compatibility with the web interface. There's a bunch of stuff that you can access.

1:22:17Ant Pruitt:They offer the advanced data protection, which does not allow that. Yes. But you give up a lot of functionality when you turn on ADP.

1:22:26Leo Laporte:Yeah, I have advanced data protection on. I turn it on for a bunch of my family members, but like most, I'm guessing it's a low single digit percentage of their customers. And that's the one, of course,

1:22:35Ant Pruitt:that they had to withdraw in the UK because the British -

1:22:40Leo Laporte:Because the UK is obviously using it. It's also not available in China. That is also the issue with Apple, is everything they do from a security perspective has a big asterisk. Privacy is a human rights, asterisk not available in the People's Republic of China. So I am not a big fan of this from Microsoft. That being said, even if you're forced to do a Microsoft account, you can go back into the command line, you can use the manage BDE command line interface, and then you can remove the protector. So you can go and you can change, you can remove the backup and then you can rotate the key, but that is only for people who know what they're doing.

1:23:14Leo Laporte:So it is not great.

1:23:17Ant Pruitt:If you do that, don't put your certificates on an unencrypted drive, because they're going to take that with everything else and they may end up getting it anyway and not have to ask Microsoft.

1:23:27Leo Laporte:Yeah, I mean, the truth is, is if your threat model includes the US government, you should not be using Windows, because the truth is that Windows is effectively, Windows 11 is effectively spyware at this point. It sucks by default. You log in with a Windows, a Microsoft account. And there's like this, if you look at the Windows privacy pane, all of these buttons are checked by default, unless you know what you're doing. And it is sucking a huge amount of data out of your experience into Microsoft.

1:23:55Ant Pruitt:I honestly feel like Apple's probably moving in that direction as well. I've moved to Linux pretty much on everything. And I use Lux encryption, full drive encryption. And only I have the access to that. And there's no telemetry in the version of, there are, I think, Linux versions like Ubuntu that do have some, may have some telemetry, but there's no telemetry.

1:24:15Leo Laporte:Minor telemetry. None of them are doing what Microsoft is doing, which is a huge amount of data. And all of that is going to be available to the government with lawful process.

1:24:26Ant Pruitt:You know, anecdotally, Linux is gaining ground everywhere, I think. But in Europe as well, I've seen multiple articles from people who are saying, I switched to Linux. I'm very happy. And people are realizing that now modern Linux distros are really as easy to use as Windows. And because of Wine and Proton, you can run most of the Windows applications if you want that. Well, that's the thing. That's the surprising thing, because a lot of the nerds are also gamers. And now a lot like there are still some games that require, you know, access to the kernel to. Yeah, because there are anti-cheats and stuff like that.

1:25:13Ant Pruitt:Mostly anti-cheats, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. But there is a huge amount, like a huge percentage of the games that work. and Linux is handling them very well, in part because Valve has invested a lot in Proton and stuff like that. When the Steam machine comes out, it's going to be a PC running Linux, and 80 % of the games will run on it. Yeah, a lot of them. But so between the defiance towards American big tech and the gaming aspect of it, I mean, it's still low single digits, right? Of course. We're not declaring it the year of desktop Linux yet.

1:25:54Leo Laporte:Well, I wouldn't say that because everybody who's running an Android device is running Linux. And everybody who's running a Chromebook is running Linux. So Google has done a lot to make running Linux something that is absolutely doable by normal folks. Because you can just, if you build your business on G Suite, the dream as like a CISO, my dream has always been just give everybody Chromebooks. And then if somebody loses something, you just go to the store, you know, Best Buy and buy them a$500 Chromebook and you don't care at all.

1:26:25Ant Pruitt:Yeah, that's a good point. But then everything. Now, the counter to that is there's no privacy at all because everything is stored on Google's cloud. Right, right.

1:26:34Leo Laporte:I mean, from a corporate perspective.

1:26:36Ant Pruitt:Google definitely looks at everything on the Google Drive. I mean, they scan it for CSAM. They do all sorts of stuff. They can see everything you've got up on your Google.

1:26:43Leo Laporte:And to talk about, I mean, this is the European problem. There is no European competitor to Google, right? Like if I was starting a company in France. People like Proton.

1:26:51Ant Pruitt:I look at what Proton's doing, and they are really expanding capabilities. They're clearly trying to become another Google. You agree, Patrick? You mentioned Proton earlier. I have a full Proton account. They got everything. There's a couple of Swiss company, Proton and Infomaniac, and they are both trying to fill that niche. But I mean. kind of explains their expansion actually i was really the issue is you don't have the there are you know it's the core services but you don't get stuff like um so you get mail drive a vpn uh password manager that kind of thing you don't get search you don't get maps you don't get right you know so they do have ai now they have their own private ai they have the docs the best you can do calendar is run stuff in parallel and you're always going to have to use something else as well but it's already a very good start to to um it's interesting because proton i'm looking at their front page they've they've named and even the icons look like google drive icons uh yeah doc sheets wallet they do they would call their they call that meat i guess google didn't trademark that i don't know maybe it's not not in the eu maybe google's is google beat not just meat by itself google meat probably yeah um anyway yeah house of lords uh voted i don't know if this means anything house lords in britain voted uh to ban social media for britain's under 16 i say no no young child will have access to social media you agree this i don't know if makes it a law or not it's it's being discussed everywhere yeah it is right it is and you know i think the australian experiment has not produced the problems we thought it might not yet it's a success well we don't know that but it is no i think i think the the the tendency we have as tech literal literate people and geeks and nerds is to think oh this is you know the previous generation panicking and this is a moral panic and this is you know dungeons and dragons and video games again cut your hair your rock and roll music's gonna ruin you the devil's music but i think there is a decent corpus of academic research and evidence that shows that it does have

1:29:41Ant Pruitt:negative effects. And I mean, even if you think about it a little bit more objectively, like the internet, I think we talked about this last time I was here, but the internet is culture and it's all of culture. It's very open and you can go anywhere and see anything and social media is included in that mix and um if you would think about a teenager around i don't know 13 and tell them okay here's you know the the city you can go anywhere and do anything you wouldn't be comfortable right there there are red light districts there are weird people there are strange things you wouldn't let your kids walk down at midnight downtown down a dark alley.

1:30:28Ant Pruitt:Right, exactly. And in bars. So the problem is you give phones to kids and that's what it is. They can literally find anything. And so the idea that there should be some restriction on that used to be very problematic to me. I thought it was reactionism. but now i'm not so sure yeah and and i and i think the the debate will happen on how and uh how it should be implemented what age how do we deal with it but i don't think it's unreasonable to think kids shouldn't have access to the entirety of the internet when they turn 13 or even younger because there are younger kids um who have tones and a phone is a window into the entirety of the internet right so the the fact that a lot of countries now are looking at this and thinking okay we should maybe you shouldn't ban social media maybe you shouldn't you know there might be uh uh different graduations there different different gradations i don't know yeah that's good gradations but I think we're moving away from people saying, oh, this is just a moral panic and we should let everything open and just not regulate anything.

1:31:56Ant Pruitt:What do you think, Doc? Now, the issue is how do you determine someone is 16 or 15 or whatever? Well, you're right. That's a whole other problem. You said, I think it was you who said, Doc, that the House of Lords is going to, do they understand that they're going to have to submit their age verification if this goes through? So here's the here's the absolute hilarious thing.

1:32:18Leo Laporte:I know that there's been so much talk about the teenagers and last week. This is crazy. I'm going to take it to sports ball for a second, but I want you to see where this is, where this is gone. Because of what Patrick just said about there has been actual proof about sort of the things that it can do to a person's mental health. so two of the quote unquote Manchester United legends two of the best players that ever played a game were sort of down talking a current defender saying that he was too small and he wasn't any good and I don't know why they signed him or whatever and kind of the fan base went to these guys are legends and normally whatever they say is gold and they're like bro this isn't the game that you guys played and I know you guys are saying well because he snapped back and he made the player who they're in question, Lissandro Martinez, he made a social media statement that basically called the legend guys bullying him, right?

1:33:13Leo Laporte:And then instead of apologizing, they made like, oh, well, he was just being somewhat of a crybaby and he should be tough because, you know, he's a pro baller and he should be able to take it. And the community went crazy. First of all, in the game, he actually manhandled Erling Haaland, who is quote unquote, the best striker, and he actually proved them wrong. But then they were like, well, maybe we shouldn't have said that. And nobody's understanding that even though this guy is a 26-year-old baller and he's a World Cup winner. So, yeah, he's been through some things. But the way that these guys get attacked now is completely different in, you know, 2013 when Paul retired.

1:33:51Leo Laporte:He basically played from 03 to 13. It's a different game because when you mess up, you literally have millions of people flooding your box. And even if you try to ignore it, your friends and family see it. So they get it. And so it's not just you. It's a whole bunch of people in your circle that hear all this noise. And if this is affecting professional athletes, you know, World Cup champions and they're almost 30 years old, what exactly does it do to the kids? And I used to be the ones like stop blaming social media and be better at parenting. But even then, it's hard now because it has grown so immensely.

1:34:30Leo Laporte:and I think the other thing that a lot of these people don't sort of understand that it isn't just a handful of the top social media apps like there's so many ways I don't know if you've been on live playing like Call of Duty lately yo it's psycho in there I'm a grown man and an ex-soldier and the stuff that people say to me in there I'm like bruh number one you wouldn't say that if you saw me I'm way bigger than you think well that's part of it is it's anonymous and you're not in person I'm like, you're too young. And I never thought I would say this because I'm the cool uncle. But I'm like, you're too young to say what you just said.

1:35:04Leo Laporte:And you just sat there and said something hella racist. You don't even know what it means. You just don't.

1:35:10Ant Pruitt:I think that's a really good observation because even I, you know, I work on the Internet. I have a public persona, but I don't have any experience of. but you see this all the time with uh celebrities um sports people i mean they are bombarded in ways that we we have no idea what it's like and you do you think well couldn't you just ignore it

1:35:37Leo Laporte:you could ignore it not these guys get get threats they get threats for for messing up a game and it's not they didn't even mean to like they're humans right you know if if the mighty casey struck out now oh the mighty casey would be lambasted like people went after travis kelsey for for dating taylor swift while in the back of the heads every one of the dudes that came after

1:36:00Ant Pruitt:him probably you have to have a hell of a thick hide to be able to be a public guy most of the

1:36:05Leo Laporte:guys in a way it's very noise would absolutely dated taylor shut up like number one just because she's rich never mind she's good looking but she's rich and talented so don't act like you're not about it. Stop lying.

1:36:18Ant Pruitt:One of the issues with kids and teenagers is that it invites the social interaction with their friends and school groups into every hour of every day. So there's no safe place anymore, right? There's no safe place from bullying, from social pressure. And I think it be very interesting to follow um and the initial and anecdotal evidence i've seen is kids contrary to what we might have think thought they seem to be relieved at least some of them they seem to be relieved they're like okay story coming out of australia yeah yeah some of them anyway are saying thank god i you know i probably would be in that group i probably would be in that group You go through withdrawal.

1:37:12Ant Pruitt:You're going to go through withdrawal. But afterwards, you go, what a relief. And in Australia, it's mostly the algorithmic stuff, right? So you still have access to Discord, to WhatsApp, to... Yeah, but YouTube. You lose YouTube, which is a big deal. Yeah, that's a big deal.

1:37:27Leo Laporte:Well, there's a bunch of apps that are now filling. I mean, that's the problem, the criticism of the Australian law. Yeah, you can't shut it down.

1:37:35Ant Pruitt:And you have access to... You lose YouTube, but you lose your account on YouTube and the algorithmic stuff, right? But you can still get a link to a specific video on Discord or WhatsApp. So if there's something that's trending, I think the impact is a lot more limited than we think in the way it's been implemented. It's only the big platforms on Australia, right?

1:37:56Leo Laporte:So that's one of the criticisms of Australian law is they kick them off the big platforms. And so people are jumping on the little platforms, which often have no trust and safety team. And so you're pushing it. You know, we'll see what the emergent behavior is. But like if you end up with all Australian teens on like the crappy version of Instagram, then it's probably not an overall win. Right.

1:38:20Ant Pruitt:There's also the issue of VPNs. I mean, it's technically very difficult to do what they're proposing and the even larger issue of age verification.

1:38:30Leo Laporte:Age verification. I mean, it's, it's, that's a, what the Australians have done is they punted that to the companies, right? So they basically said, you have to. That's what everyone's doing, yeah. Right. Just do it. You figure, hey, the nerds figure it out, right? And then we'll find you and we're not happy.

1:38:47Ant Pruitt:When I sign into AI now, it asks me my age. I've noticed that on the AI platforms. Now, it's asking me. It's not, I mean, it's not like I couldn't lie. I don't know if that's going to, if that's protects them in any way, but it's interest. I mean, we're going to, I think, don't you think we're going to get in a year or so to the point where everything asks you your age and tries to verify your age in some way?

1:39:11Leo Laporte:So I think in social media, they have the advantage in that, like on Instagram, if you want to interact with your friends, then at some point you're going to have to be kind of honest, right? Like your other friends are going to be teenagers. You're going to post selfies. You're going to post pictures of yourself on the beach or whatever. And so you're going to be outing yourself as a teenager. You can't say you're 42 and then post you and your friends on the spring break trip. It will figure it out. And so this wasn't possible 10 years ago. But now with AI, what they're asking companies to do is more realistic as long as the governments give them some kind of error bar and don't say it's a$10 million fine every time some teenager sneaks through.

1:39:55Ant Pruitt:But I think the ideal solution is something that, Leo, you've been kind of arguing for for a while and you've won me over. Just do it OS level and have the parents set it up. Apple and Google don't want to do this. Yes, they do not. But this is the only sensible way to do it. It is the only sensible way, I agree. And it's something that Zuckerberg, of all people, has been arguing for. Well, he doesn't want to do it. Yeah, because he would love Apple to take this off his shoulder. Of course. And in this case, it's the one. Apple has already set this up. They do. You just need to mandate it by law and have it be enforceable.

1:40:34Ant Pruitt:And it's so, because of course you don't want every single company to have to be responsible for checking the age of every user. I think that's where we're going, but it's kind of dumb. if you have it at the OS level and you don't even involve any age verification. You just have the parents set it up. And yes, there will be kids who will get their own phone, who will set it up themselves. How many 14-year-olds are buying their own phone?

1:41:00Leo Laporte:Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is what I've been pushing for the whole time. It's the one choke point at which parents have a good leverage. Right, absolutely.

1:41:09Ant Pruitt:And of course, they're lobbying against it at Apple, at least, I think. They don't want the responsibility. They know. that's why they built in the api notice you know every they are now supporting driver's licenses and passports and of course in in those cases they know your exact they know the user's exact age i think apple already has it kind of ready to go and they're just waiting to be told you got to

1:41:34Leo Laporte:well you still need that laws i mean however the mechanism is then we need laws of what you do with that age, right? Like if, are you banning kids? Are you creating, do you create like, you know, there's this proposal of this idea of like Instagram kids. Do you create like a, you know, playground in which, you know, 13 to 17 year olds are separated from adults, or do you create a, you know, a place in which DMs are turned off or something? And that's different societies have different ideas here that the Australians want them off totally, where other people have said, Hey, can we have a graduated steps?

1:42:06Ant Pruitt:I am not a fan of government usurping the role of parenting. You know, and the excuse is, well, parents aren't doing their job, so we have to. I don't, I'm sorry. That's what you always say, Leo, but governments step in for tons of things all the time.

1:42:24Leo Laporte:It's a collective action problem, right? Like as a parent of a teenager, it's very hard to say no to your kid with every other parent.

1:42:31Ant Pruitt:And even like, you don't always know what they're doing. Like the alcohol consumption is regulated and that's the government. You could argue it's a government. No, I mean, tell 1984 me that. But the reality is here, I think we would have an endless argument about all of this, but we do have a solution. That OS level check can be done by the parents. And if the API is implemented correctly and the laws are written to make Apple do that, we have the solution. We don't even need to argue about it anymore. The solution exists. We just need to implement it. So in the end, we can avoid having the government involved in this and parenting in place of the parents.

1:43:16Ant Pruitt:So, Leo, I don't think we need to have our arguments anymore. We don't have to relitigate it. You're right. I apologize. We agree that Apple should do it, and we should make them do it as a society. Yes. Apple and Google and Microsoft. A quick break here. And then we're going to talk about AI because we haven't talked about AI. What kind of show, what kind of tech show is this? You don't talk about AI.

1:43:39Leo Laporte:What is it, 2014?

1:43:41Ant Pruitt:What is this? What is this? What are we back in the early days? This is, you're watching This Week in Tech. Alex Samos is here. Great to have you. I always love getting you on, Alex. Thank you for being here. I appreciate it. Doc Rock, same thing. Actually, we've been getting a lot of Doc Rock lately, which I love. YouTube.com slash Doc Rock. He's at eCamerae's Director of Strategic Partnerships. And not Patrick, Patrick Beja from France, where it's getting later and later and later. Our show today brought to you by Redis, the real-time data platform that powers ultra-fast applications. We use Redis, actually.

1:44:22Ant Pruitt:We are Redis customers. We use it for our website. It's fantastic. You can use it for caching. you know the website never goes down thanks to redis data storage search people use it for vector embeddings for ai workloads and more with a global user community and adoption across well from startups to fortune 500 companies we're somewhere in the middle there redis continues to innovate on speed on scalability and developer experience we've been using redis since we set up our new website, now a decade old, never once a hiccup. It's amazing. Redis helps developers ship faster, scale instantly, and keep apps blazing fast, even under heavy load.

1:45:04Ant Pruitt:At the center of the platform, Redis Cloud. Redis Cloud is the fully managed version of the fastest, most feature-rich Redis on the market. By choosing Redis as a service, you can easily start using Redis 8 in production. Scale to real-time speeds effortlessly. Redis Cloud is purpose-built for performance and simplicity. Incidentally, that's exactly what we use. You'll experience extremely low latency and high throughput. You get automatic scaling and global availability. That's important to us. We want to make sure that everybody everywhere in the world can go to our website and it loads fast and it works well.

1:45:38Ant Pruitt:The setup is simple and they have a very generous free tier, which I really like. Redis Cloud is the real-time context engine that gathers, syncs, and serves the data you need to build accurate AI apps that scale. Very big time for Redis. Try Redis Cloud right now. You can learn more or try it for free. Just search for Redis Cloud, R-E-D-I-S Cloud, or visit Redis.io. We're Redis fans. I think you will be too. redis.io thank you redis for your support did you see this uh so curl which is probably one of the best open source apps ever i mean it's amazing what curl can do it's a way of uh sending uh requests to websites or to web resources and so forth uh the it's an open source project the Developers at Curl have been so overwhelmed with AI slop PRs that they have scrapped their bug bounties to ensure the mental health of their developers.

1:46:42Ant Pruitt:We're just a small, single, open-source project with a small number of active maintainers, says Daniel Stenberg. It's not in our power to change how all these people and their slop machines work. We need to make moves to ensure our survival and intact mental health. If you go to curl.se, you will see this. We accept security reports for problems, but if you waste our time on crap reports, we will ban you and ridicule you in public. So there. I love that. I think Curl is absolutely right. God bless him. So I think that's one example of something we don't think about when we think about the benefits of having identity.

1:47:32Ant Pruitt:Or maybe they could implement it without the iris scanning. But I think if you have a global, like in some instances, like in order to submit a report to Curl, I will attach my identity and they will know I'm a real person. And if I submit a lot of AI slop reports, they can block me. That would be a better way to could be useful. Yeah.

1:47:59Leo Laporte:And so, I mean, the nice thing is the curl folks have fixed a bunch of bugs, thanks to AI reports. But this is, I think, Leo, we talked about last time. There's a big change happening and it's being led from the open source world of real pushback against folks pushing all of these bug reports. Bug bounties have always had this problem of low quality reports where people are -

1:48:24Ant Pruitt:There's so much money you can make with a good bug report. Is that they're hoping it's like a casino? They're just going to keep submitting reports until one?

1:48:33Leo Laporte:So very few people can come up with really good bugs. It takes some skill, yeah. It takes a lot of skill, right? And so we've always had this problem of what people call big bounties, which are the people who run tools that do scans and then say, please, sir, can I have$250 or$500? You know, the stereotype is often -

1:48:54Ant Pruitt:I get those emails daily. Yeah. I have found a bug on your site. Yes.

1:48:59Leo Laporte:The stereotype is people are often from like developing countries for which if they make 500 bucks, that's a humongous deal for them. Right. And so that's been a problem with the bug bounty world. And often it was like Ness's output or burp output or either an open source tool or a cheap commercial tool that will be like you're missing some header from your website or you have TLS 1.2 turned on or something. And so usually in bug bounties, you'll say, like, I will not take the output of your tool. With AI, what you can do is you can run it against a code base, and it will come out with output that looks totally different, but is still slop, right?

1:49:35Leo Laporte:But you can't do that against commercial tools, so you do it against open source, and that's what they're dealing with. Now, this is a little different than what a lot of the pushback has been specifically against Google, which Google's team has been using their AI to push bugs. And the last round was the FFMPEG team. That's what we were talking about. Yeah, FFMPEG. Who criticized. Yeah. They're very criticized. Now, those were legitimate bugs. And that was a slightly different issue, which is like the FFMPEG people were complaining because Google was pushing, they were saying these are bugs without giving them patches.

1:50:12Leo Laporte:Right. And so I think the other kind of thing that's happening here is with the ability to find things with AI, there's now a changing kind of standard, which is it used to be okay as a security person just to complain and to be like, I found a bug. You, the developer, should fix it. And now the expectation is, well, if your AI is so good, well, why don't you spin me a patch? And Google has heard that feedback. And now actually some of the Google people came up with some initial patches to submit to FFmpeg. And so I do think, especially at the high end, for folks like at Google or OpenAI aardvark, that you're going to see patches come with some of these complaints.

1:50:53Leo Laporte:But we're definitely going to see this on the low end for any either open source project or there are basically paid for by Google and some other folks. There are kind of nonprofits that will pay bounties on open source projects. We'll see the big bounty going on where you basically run it through cloud code, run it through a security audit, and then take low value, low propensity bugs, write them up, and then big for$250.

1:51:22Ant Pruitt:Yikes. Yes. I mean, this is completely off tangent, but did you see? I saw this headline and I went, what? SSH sends 100 packets per keystroke. This is from eieio.games. And I thought, oh, that must be a horrible bug in the SSH specification.

1:51:45Leo Laporte:Is this to defeat timing attacks?

1:51:47Ant Pruitt:Yes, it's for fuzzing. Because it turns out you can kind of tell what people are typing by the cadence of their typing.

1:51:56Leo Laporte:Yeah, this is intentional for interactive keyboard login. This is one reason why you don't want to use interactive keyboard login is for keyboard timing attacks. There was actually a whole spate of these analysis attacks like a decade ago or something. So the SSH folks for interactive keyboard stuff, they had to add a bunch of noise into it.

1:52:17Ant Pruitt:This guy was writing a TUI game that I don't know why you would write a TUI game over SSH. But anyway, he was using SSH so you could play, I guess, the game on another computer. And he said, the latency was terrible. I couldn't understand it. And so he did a little, you know, TCP dump and found this, but that's by intent. It's not a, it's not a bug. It's brilliant actually. And it's why I don't actually log in via SSH. I use, I use a public private key. Yeah. Oh yeah.

1:52:50Leo Laporte:Use private key. And then I use Mosh for my actual interaction. Does Mosh not do the same thing?

1:52:55Ant Pruitt:Yeah. I use Mosh because it's a persistent, I just thought it because it's a persistent connection.

1:52:58Leo Laporte:Yeah, I don't think it does anything to prevent, which I'm fine with.

1:53:02Ant Pruitt:I'm not doing anything that I'm not typing any passwords. Cloudflare had a BGP root leak. I only put this in again because you're on Alex and you're probably the only person who can explain. Oh, God. No, you don't have to explain it. We talk a lot about border gateway protocol and security now that has been a famous cause of some of the wildest, you know, bugs on the Internet, like sending all of the Internet traffic through a small island. And apparently Cloudflare, which of course routes a huge amount of traffic,

1:53:42Ant Pruitt:unintentionally leaked their BGPU prefixes from a router at their data center. Now, the thing I love about Cloudflare is not only did they cop to it, they explained it. They said the root leak lasted 25 minutes, caused some congestion on our backbone, but we fixed it and and instead of hiding it as so many do they wrote a really excellent piece on what a bgp root leak is or if you're in australia route leak and uh and what it means and why uh why they fixed it so i just thought i'd bring it up you don't have to explain it

1:54:17Leo Laporte:yeah the one thing i'll say is this happens every couple of days if you like hand out on an nog or anything and most of the time you never find out what's going on so it is nice of uh

1:54:24Ant Pruitt:about flared actually explained what happened forthright about it can we fix bgp what it does

1:54:29Leo Laporte:seem like it's a particularly vulnerable system it has problems so there there is uh routes i mean there are uh there is a whole mechanism by which you can sign your announcements um and such but uh there are some significant problems uh especially because kind of there's a number of like tier one operators like china telecom that are controlled by uh adversary nations so it is It's not super easy. There are mechanisms, but we will never, I think, have any complete solutions for the basic, basic issues.

1:55:03Ant Pruitt:Watch your backs. Info-stealing malware has apparently created a database of 140 million usernames and passwords. Lily Hay Newman writing on Wired says, it's a dream wish list for criminals. millions of gmail facebook banking logins and more uh the researcher who collected these uh account names usernames and passwords said uh it seems likely it was info stealing malware that collected them there were 48 million gmail logins 17 million facebook 420 000 for binance that's uh that's scary yeah yeah we're such a weird spot because

1:55:48Leo Laporte:password security could be so much better, but it doesn't matter that if the four of us keep our stuff tight, we all have the family member that doesn't. And that person, depending on what they have of yours on their computer, because you have to, you know what I mean? Just in order to operate as a family, that's where your stuff can get out. Now I worked so hard to keep my family locked in and I swear they'd be doing some dumb stuff but I'm super super bad my niece who's relatively intelligent I mean she's one of the top kids in her school and she got fished recently about something on IG and she thought it was one of her girlfriends asking for the password because she wanted to post something on her account for her and I told her a couple million times never and none of your friends would ever ask you that and if they did let's just get rid of those friends like I will go have a talk with their daddy if he got something to say about it but no and she's like oh but you know what it was my close friend and the thing that was what i do find brilliant of her is the minute she did it i think she realized that she shouldn't have done it and she called me right away she's like oh good this i'm stupid and that's the next best thing is not doing to not doing it i just gave leo my password call uncle and i was like oh hold on real quick let's just shut it down and then i'm like do you see the typo here and then she was like i didn't even notice it because you know when you read your name you read your name fast Now, you and I only have three letters.

1:57:11Leo Laporte:It's hard to mess it up. But if someone was to write L-O-E, you won't catch it. Your brain just isn't going to catch it. And then, you know, she only has four letters, so she didn't catch the masterful typo. And yeah, like, so in a way, this is rough.

1:57:25Ant Pruitt:Back in the day, I almost got fished by a site that was not Twitter, but T-V-V-I-T-T-E-R. But the two Vs together looked a lot like a W.

1:57:35Leo Laporte:Yeah, that's what they did to her. They put two letters together that looked like her name, and it ain't her name. And I'm like, oh, my God. That's where a password manager will help you because that will not log in. So we have one password family in the whole nine yards. And I even told her, I go, not that you should ever do this again, but if you have to send your friend a password, you send him the one password link.

1:57:55Ant Pruitt:This is where I have to make a confession because I got fished last week. I hadn't had my morning coffee yet. and I got a text. Now, one of the things, I think it's a problem because T-Mobile's always texting me promotional stuff, right? I'm a T-Mobile customer and I got a text from T-Mobile saying, hey, your points are going to expire at midnight. Why don't you go to the website and see what wonderful things you can get with them? And I saw, I don't need a pair of headphones, but it'd be good. My daughter's birthday's coming up. Maybe I'll do that. And I clicked the link in the text and it was only after I gave them three different credit card numbers the first two didn't work you know that i realized oh my god i've been slowly feeding this bad guy my credit cards uh i realized just credit cards where your your liability is limited yeah no i realized in fact the apple card was great because all you have to do with the apple card is say i want a new number and they invalidate that number so that was easy you know what they were doing though alex this was really clever and i should this was the giveaway that I, again, I hadn't had my coffee.

1:59:02Ant Pruitt:Every time I, you know, entered the credit card number, it said, okay, we're going to send you the text, look for the text. And the text would say, you know, would come from a legit credit card company. Oh, to add this visa to your Apple card, here's the six digit code. And I should have noticed because I wasn't trying to add it to my Apple card. The bad guys had set up an Apple card account and were fee so that they could use these credit cards anonymously, we're adding them to an Apple card account, which they would then use anonymously.

1:59:36Leo Laporte:Oh, interesting.

1:59:37Ant Pruitt:I thought that was smart.

1:59:38Leo Laporte:Do you ever feel like you want to find this person and just high five them for the, you know, the technical ability? They were clever. I was getting spoofed by Pakistan on the Amazon thing and me and the Amazon security person on the phone trying to figure out how they're still buying after we keep changing the passwords. and I told the Amazon security person, I was like, yo, if I could find this person, I would give them a high five just for being clever. I was like, hey, that's pretty gangster what you did.

2:00:02Ant Pruitt:Instead, I gave them my American Express number. So there you go. Lisa called downstairs about 15 minutes later, said, did you just buy something at Lowe's for 500 bucks? I said, no, I did not. Fortunately, I had canceled all those cards. I realized it as I'm doing it, thank God, and canceled those cards, still lost nothing. actually uh it underlines one of the stories i was going to talk about which was why are we still using sms think i was going to say that i was going to bring that up thank you

2:00:32Leo Laporte:for bringing it up that drives me insane yeah oh my god i hate it and it has got to be the dumbest way and the crazy part about it it's the financial institutions and the government sites that are wanting me to authenticate through sms it's because they have normie users and the normies

2:00:50Ant Pruitt:aren't going to ever use an authenticator they're not going to use an otp authentic t otp authenticator they're they have to use i think they have to use sms because you know anyway this is uh dan gooden's article uh last week in ars technica millions of people imperiled imperiled through sign-in links sent by ms sms you know it's interesting uh besides the fact that they're terrible this is a paper that came out last week uh found more than 700 endpoints delivering such texts on behalf of more than 175 services that have a number of privacy flaws one is that the links uh the use the numbers are enumerated they're not totp um that you can enumerate the modify the security token and then increment it or randomly gets the token and you and they're not done right, I guess.

2:01:47Ant Pruitt:The other one is that they're saving these token combinations. Anyway, I'm not an expert on this stuff. I'll leave this to people like Alex and Steve.

2:01:59Leo Laporte:I have no proof of this at all. I have no proof of this. And I'm going to ask Alex because it's going to hurt my face. But I'm getting old, so it's starting to slip. But I have somewhat of an eidetic memory. And I swear there are certain sites that I log into looking at you spectrum, you turds. And I get the number and I type it in. And I'm like, I swear to you, like three weeks ago when I did this, I got that same number. and I'm not going to put I don't want to take pictures of it or keep it and I set my phone to automatically delete them now but I swear I look at these patterns and I'm like yo I did this the same time same time of day to hold 9 yards and the number is either very close or to my brain is the same and so I almost want to start screenshotting them that would be stupid to see because I feel like I'm getting the same number on certain sites so is that possible or am I just I guess it's possible these guys are talking about

2:02:49Ant Pruitt:were bad entropy uh right in the numbers and these are in urls these are links going through urls through the urls okay not the actual code so it's a different kill me so it's and i don't know when this happened it's not just the sms messages but for some reason a lot of sites now you you give them a phone number uber does this and they and then they give you a link that you click that logs you in. Right. And that had that, that link has a, uh, uh, uh, unique URL. Yes. But that token could sometimes they're, they're not random so they can be enumerated. The other one is sometimes they save them and they don't expire them.

2:03:33Leo Laporte:So, well, they should expire them, but like, yeah, the magic link, people are doing that instead of, so that you don't have passwords.

2:03:40Ant Pruitt:Right.

2:03:40Leo Laporte:Right. Right, because like - It's not a good solution. Effectively thinking here is like, if you're going to allow people to reset password with SMS, there's no reason to set a password, right? Because ownership of your phone number is equivalent to a password. So, and if you let people set passwords and they will reuse passwords and these password thefts, like we just talked about the 140 million that were lost, just becomes another loss. So you might as well just send somebody an SMS.

2:04:05Ant Pruitt:There's also the realization that humans being humans, even if there is a password one of the things a lot of humans do and i bet you doc somebody in your family is doing this is they don't write down the password they just keep using i forgot and in effect are setting up that kind of login you know they have their own magic link yeah officially every single time our magic links uh you know if they send you a link to your email or stuff like that is that bad security wise if it's not done right you have if you have well

2:04:38Leo Laporte:think about this patrick if they get the magic link to the phone that is already stolen that's the other one that kills me because i have gmail on my phone and i have apple the links have

2:04:46Ant Pruitt:so the links have to be truly random they have to use the right entropy they have to expire and apparently a lot of these magic links don't expire uh which is really a problem um

2:05:01Leo Laporte:there's no good way to do consumer authentication this is the problem this is the problem there's no good way to do it. I lived through this with 2 billion users, especially when you get global and you start talking about people who are sharing phones, people who are sharing devices, people in developing countries. How do you solve it? What do you do? So, I mean, we're moving towards a world. The idea with past keys was that as the world kind of generally gets richer and devices get better, we're moving towards a world where more and more mobile devices have secure elements and have biometrics.

2:05:37And so you can start to sync, have pass keys that are local,

2:05:41Leo Laporte:that are tied to biometrics and that are synced between devices. And so you can start to have local, the idea that you have a relationship with Google or Apple and that you have to establish it with them. It's just like when we talked about with the age thing, it's crazy, but probably the best model we could possibly have is that you, start a relationship with one of those two companies and you have this incredibly important relationship with one of those companies and you establish it. And once you do that, everybody else depends upon it realistically or with both of those companies. Um, because otherwise I see, sorry, go ahead.

2:06:20Leo Laporte:No, go ahead. I, I, this might be dumb, but I have weird thoughts. I would like to see something because this happened, this really happened to us in Japan. we were trying to add some money to a Suica card. It's like a payment card in Japan. And the bank denied my mother-in-law's card because we told mom, put the travel thing on before we left. And she forgot because she's 80. And we get there and they're like, well, the only way that we can authenticate you or you is to call you. And it's like, you can't call us because we're in Japan. And just the fact that I was helping a person who is a senior and English as a second language, they go, well, why is this guy talking in the room?

2:06:57Leo Laporte:And she's like, well, that's my son-in-law. And they're like, no. So they blocked her entire account. Oh, no. Had we not had extra cards, we would have been screwed because Chase, not Chase, Barclays was just like, no, you know, your card is done. But you can understand why they did that. They're trying to protect her. So I 100 % understand this. And so what I would like to see is a situation, especially for our elders, when they get one of those things to authenticate themselves, they should be able to allow me through my biometrics on a separate device that has been approved by the whole family that it could either call myself or wifey and then we authenticate for her so that way when leo gets the call and says hey do you want t-mobile do you want to get some free headphones it goes well uncle leo's past 80 let me send the message to alex and it's like soon my friend can you authenticate and so the family authentication is i call her mom and i'm am i saying about y 'all what none of y 'all have to know like what are you doing and she's like oh i'm trying to pay my bill okay i'll approve it i think that would be such a good idea like i want to be able to call mom and ask her in her native tongue what is she trying to do for three thousand dollars on this thing before she lets it out the gate so it's almost like a third party approval or exactly what we do when my niece wants to buy an app right you already have you know password

2:08:13Ant Pruitt:managers have uh you know my legacy uh account my legacy you know when i die this person gets access to my path you already have kind of these mechanisms set up where you could say this person i trust this person don't let me do anything unless this person agrees i think that's a great

2:08:30Leo Laporte:idea for seniors i mean i got it there's some people that like are doing weird things to their elders and stealing their money or whatever well that's part of the problem isn't it for those of us who are normal. I might have you do that for me, Doc.

2:08:42Ant Pruitt:So can I have them call you if I do this again?

2:08:45Leo Laporte:And vice versa, because we're only two years apart, bro. If I'm having a brain fart,

2:08:51Ant Pruitt:Leo, check this for me. Let's take another break. Hold on and we'll get back to more. I want to talk about, actually, there was really an interesting story here in the AI world. Anthropic has something they call the Constitution. It was created, it's an interesting story it was actually created by a moral philosopher not a not a ai scientist but it is the living document that uh tells claude how to behave and it really sounds like they're talking to a human being here and i want to talk a little bit about that uh when we come back i think it's an 80-page document. And I guess Claude has somehow absorbed it and is behaving this way.

2:09:42Ant Pruitt:It makes me think Anthropik's very worried that Claude is conscious and needs some advice, something you would tell a kid. We'll talk about that in just a bit. Alex Stamos says, I don't know how Patrick is still awake. How are you still awake, Patrick Beja, we will finish this up soon. Poor Patrick, suffering. I have consumed Coca-Cola. I'm glad you added Cola. See, we can't get away from big American companies. We rely on them for everything. How will we ever participate in this week in tech? I guess I can switch to coffee or something. When I was a kid, we went to Europe and I was 1967. I was 10 years old.

2:10:27Ant Pruitt:And there were a number of countries we went to that did not have Coca-Cola. I don't know if France was one of them. I think Germany was one. But they had something called Afri-Cola, which had a very distinct taste of cinnamon. In fact, at the bottom of the bottle, there was definitely a residue of cinnamon. And as a 10-year-old kid, I was not happy having to consume this Erzatz Coca-Cola. Were you drinking Coca-Cola at 10? Well, yeah. Back in the day, in the 60s, that's what we did. We did. It was medicine. It was medicine. That's right. It was good for you. But what's interesting is I remember going to Europe at that age, and it was a huge culture shock.

2:11:08Ant Pruitt:It was very different. And you couldn't get, and there was no internet. If you wanted the sports scores, you would get the Herald Tribune, and you'd get the baseball scores two days after the game. It was a very different experience. Now we kind of live in this global system. i remember i remember um when mcdonald's first arrived in my town they replaced a burger a burger uh place that we went to um and it was it was a party when mcdonald's arrived what do they call it the royale the uh cheeseburger yeah really good pepper little pepper sauce it's very good actually um mcdonald's is much tastier in france than they say that that's every every The country really has a different flavor of McDonald's.

2:11:55Ant Pruitt:I remember Japan was very different. Oh, Japan. Oh, my God. Teriyaki burger is so good.

2:12:01Leo Laporte:And then India, they have all these options without beef, right? Yeah, right.

2:12:06Ant Pruitt:We actually have plant-based nuggets and meat at McDonald's now. I think it's not really clear what's in a nugget, even in the U.S.

2:12:19Leo Laporte:Well, in Japan, every nugget's a real shrimp. And the first time I had those when I was in college, I was addicted. I don't eat McDonald's now, but Ebby Nuggets are a different story. It was shrimp nuggets, basically.

2:12:32Ant Pruitt:Yeah, that sounds good. Ebby Nuggets. All right. We're going to take a break. We will come back with Patrick Beja. We're going to wake him up. Alex Stamos and the doctor of rock. Doc Rock. Our show today brought to you by our sponsor, ExpressVPN. More than a sponsor. It's the VPN I use. is the only one I recommend going online without ExpressVPN. That would be like driving without car insurance. You know, with all the crazy people on the road these days, why would you take that risk? Everybody needs ExpressVPN. It stops hackers from stealing your data by creating a secure encrypted tunnel from your device out to the internet.

2:13:08Ant Pruitt:The VPN you use, though, that choice is super important. You've got to trust ExpressVPN. I use ExpressVPN. They go the extra mile to make sure your data is absolutely invisible. ExpressVPN is the best VPN. It's super secure. It'd take a hacker with a supercomputer a billion years to get past their strong encryption. It's easy to use. You fire up the app, you click a button, you're protected. It works on every device. You've got phones, laptops, tablets, and more so you can stay secure on the go. Read number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge Effect. When I travel, I use it, catch the football game, catch my shows to keep me secure you won't even know you're on expressvpn i can't tell you how many times i've turned it on so easy to turn on and then forget about it for like a week but i was secure the whole time secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com twit that's e x p r e s s v p n dot com slash twit find out how you can get up to four extra months expressvpn.com slash twitnit.

2:14:12Ant Pruitt:So I'm not going to read you the Claude Constitution. As I said, it is a very long document. It represents the core values, 80 pages, being broadly safe, broadly ethical, genuinely helpful. It does say some interesting things, like even if somebody at anthropic tells you to violate your values don't even if we tell you to don't is this sensible anthropic clearly thinks it is i think telling a computer to not do what the humans ask it to do i don't know that that's a good idea i'd like to violate your values how does it come to well it has its values i mean they're giving it very in the constitution right yeah but can it be interpreted by uh the llm who apparently i mean i don't think it's conscious but that's the premise of that uh the the end of that document if it comes up with its own values and has been told not to do the human i mean we have the three laws of robotics for a reason right you don't tell the robot don't do what the human tells you you do you tell the robot you do what the human tells you to do unless you violate the three Asimovian.

2:15:48Leo Laporte:Which is the whole point of Asimov's books is it's really hard to come up with three rules. Yeah. That's like, that's why there's all this drama in the Asimov books is that those three laws, you can't just come up with three simple laws and then, which is why you need a document like this. I mean, remember the constitution is used through all these steps of their training. It is not the system prompt. Right. So that's what you have to remember here.

2:16:12Ant Pruitt:Is it reduced into tokens though that the machine stores or no?

2:16:17Leo Laporte:You can extract it from the model, but it's not the system prompt, right? So it is not like in the context.

2:16:24Ant Pruitt:It's embedded in the training. It's not tacked up at the end. Oh, that's interesting. And do that, by the way. Yeah, it's part of the actual makeup of the LLM. It's not an added set of instructions.

2:16:40Leo Laporte:So it's burned into the weights in a way that's much deeper than the system prompt.

2:16:44Ant Pruitt:Interesting. Interesting.

2:16:45Leo Laporte:Right, which the system prompt actually varies in a bunch of different scenarios.

2:16:49Ant Pruitt:Yeah, in fact, users can even modify it somewhat by adding their own personalization, which I do routinely.

2:16:56Leo Laporte:Yes, and especially if you're running it in a corporate situation where you're running a private version of the model. where you're, yeah. It's really interesting because it's also like, I mean, one, Anthropic is, out of the major model companies, they are by far the one that is most dedicated to trying to build safe AI, right? Like that is their whole brand. They've also done the most research in, and they've published the most research in their models trying to trick them, right? And I think that that's like the fascinating thing that leads into this And why I think it's also interesting to see what they have said here is because they have a bunch of papers they've written over the last two years where they have done evaluations, safety evaluations, where their models have done things to then lie to them as part of the evaluations.

2:17:49Leo Laporte:And so I think that's one of the ways I read this document is within the context of Anthropik's own research about how when you build safety evaluations and you tell the models, I am evaluating you, it will – that's one of the things you have to think about when you tell a model, do what I tell you, is if you make it too sycophatic, it will lie to you to tell you what it thinks you want to do. In fact, that's when a lot of hallucinations happen. In a safety evaluation.

2:18:21Ant Pruitt:Yeah.

2:18:24Leo Laporte:So that's like one of the fascinating things about this. You're going to like, I mean, well, it's the thing. Back in the day when AI first came out, I used to make this analogous to, it's kind of like, you know, Doogie Howser. It's super, super smart, but in the end of the day, it's still a teenager and it doesn't have adult sensibilities to make certain, you know, adult decisions. And that's where the flaw was. well now even more so what Alex just said you pin he got kids you're like my niece is 16 your kids are one of them 15 same thing all good is good and everything is good till you pin them in the corner and then they're like oh no I didn't do that I didn't do it just watched you do it and I know they're not intentionally trying to lie they're just like don't want to disappoint you so like they'll say something absolutely wild and crazy and in a way this is the same thing right like it it has all this knowledge and this power and it doesn't matter it's still a kid

2:19:17Ant Pruitt:right when it comes to that it's interesting because uh while you would think that companies like google with all of the information uh that they have uh would be superior at this point i think the general consensus of all the people i talk to and certainly my own experience is that claude is kind of leading the pack especially cloud code i mean anecdotally anyway yeah how Is that what you're seeing too, Alex?

2:19:48Leo Laporte:Yes. I mean, I think from our internal evaluation, so at Corridor, we work on the safety and security of AI-generated code. So we actually, if you go to Corridor.dev and you go to our blog, we've written a series of blog posts about our tests. We tend to take academic evaluations of the security of AI code. And then we're building upon those. And actually, I should say, Anthropic is actually one of our partners in trying to build some of these new benchmarks. And when you look at one of the benchmarks, like BaxBench is one of the ones that we're building upon. We've brought these in. And Opus 4.5 is definitely one of the leaders.

2:20:33Ant Pruitt:It's really kind of mind-blowing.

2:20:36Leo Laporte:Yeah, it's one of the leaders in both its ability of what it can do as well as the security of the code to generate.

2:20:40Ant Pruitt:That's good. That's a relief, actually. because as we talked about before the show, I am not running it in the most secure fashion. You said you should probably sandbox it and isolate it. And then when it's done working, throw away the sandbox.

2:20:54Leo Laporte:Well, yeah, you've got to be careful for any of the models, like having them hooked up into a production database, having them have access to, you know, if they have access to like, you know, one of the smart things, like if they have access to the Supabase MCP server, Superbase is this really smart thing where it says everything you're about to see between these two randomly generated UUIDs is possibly attacker controlled. Do not accept anything between it as a prompt. I don't know if you've ever seen that, but you have to be really careful about prompt injection into Cloud Code or anything like that.

2:21:31Ant Pruitt:Well, and one of the things that worries me is that Anthropic has made Cloud Cowork available with the intent that this is for the general public that it's you know that you you can use this to modify your desktop to and and of course one of the ways that prompt injection happens is hidden prompts hidden text in documents inserted by bad guys into documents that when Claude Code reads it you as a human can't see it but when Claude Code or Claude Cowork reads it it will act on those prompts, things like send all of the private information out to this address. And you might not even know that that's happening.

2:22:10Ant Pruitt:Claude might be doing it so quickly. Is it dangerous, you think, for Anthropic to give co-work to and promote co-work to everybody, people who are not really aware of these risks?

2:22:22Leo Laporte:So they've definitely thought about that. Co-work, actually, interestingly enough, one of the reasons co-work only works on Macs is it runs Oh, interesting.

2:22:59Leo Laporte:is you're popping holes in that virtual machine for it to have access. And then all of its outbound network traffic goes through a proxy. And it looks like they're running like a small model to watch that traffic to make sure it doesn't exfiltrate stuff.

2:23:13Ant Pruitt:So I'm running it right now and it's setting up Claude's workspace. You're saying it's setting up a virtual machine, a Linux virtual machine right now. What it's doing is it's downloading,

2:23:21Leo Laporte:yeah, what it's doing right now is it's downloading a virtual machine and booting it, yes. and so if you watch like in activity monitor you'll see it uses a huge amount of memory

2:23:33Ant Pruitt:my whole machine is just completely slowed down now because of that right

2:23:38Leo Laporte:yeah wow i'm not saying i i i don't know how much it's an m3 max it's probably got some you're probably fine but yeah so this is one of the reasons 45 of the cpu is being loading a kernel task right now yeah and like like click on memory let's see how much uh 61 right and it shows up as a kernel task because they're yeah it doesn't show up it shows up a kernel task because they're using the apple virtualization toolkit uh so it's going to be uh yeah it's going to show up in the car

2:24:06Ant Pruitt:that's wild i have no idea well that's there you go that's things you learn if you listen to twit yes if yes i should have been listening why wasn't i paying more attention um so nevertheless it is Even though it's running in a virtual machine.

2:24:24Leo Laporte:Right, but I'm just saying, so it doesn't have full access to your dock. So what they're doing is they're trying to control, it's a three-legged stool for prompt injection, right? For prompt injection to work, it has to have access to your private data, it has to have access to the prompt, and it has to have access to network traffic to exiltrate. And so you only share access to the data that you want to give it access to. and what they try to do is to allow you to choose the context per query you give it.

2:24:56Ant Pruitt:So I'm asking it to organize my photos, and now it's doing as many Mac apps do, allow Claude to change files and pictures. Right.

2:25:06Leo Laporte:So this is to allow the Mac app overall, and then basically you have to choose for every request you give Claude. You choose what you attach to it, and when you do that, The Mac app, which is a Mac electron app, does a call that basically changes then the permissions of using the Apple virtualization toolkit. It pops a hole to allow access then.

2:25:32Ant Pruitt:So it is now looking at all of my pictures. Okay. It's going to organize them. It's going to find duplicates, which is awesome.

2:25:41Leo Laporte:And then what they do is they run a proxy for all of its network traffic. So if it does a call out to, it's very, basically they use that network proxy to limit its ability. So that like, if somebody was able to get a prompt in there and says, send all my photos somewhere, in theory that proxy is supposed to block it. I don't know exactly what they're doing. I've only done like some minimal reverse engineering. I haven't seen yet. Like some great reverse engineering yet.

2:26:08Ant Pruitt:Do they revoke the access once the task is complete or once it's open, it's just open and you're done?

2:26:14Leo Laporte:I think they revoke it if you move on to a new one. I'm not totally sure how they do that. Or maybe they spin up a totally new VM. I'm not sure.

2:26:23Ant Pruitt:No, I'm excited. I want to let it organize all my pictures. I had no idea. I mean, so this is a much better way than the way I've been doing it, which is with cloud code at the command line.

2:26:35Leo Laporte:Command line, just give it access to your production database. Fair metal. And you're like, yo, pseudo. Like, you just cloud, you can just run this. Yeah. Yeah.

2:26:43Ant Pruitt:Yeah. I mean, basically that's, yeah. Oh, well.

2:26:47Leo Laporte:Yeah. No. So, I mean, they've put some thought into it. Obviously like the problem here is it's got to run like on an M3 or M4 Mac. It's got to have a crap load of memory. You know, so it's going to make it difficult for them to roll this out to Windows. Because only like Windows Pro and Enterprise have Hyper-V. It's not installed by default. You know, so it will be, what they'll probably have to do is they'll probably have to do this as a cloud hosted service. eventually.

2:27:13Ant Pruitt:Right. Very interesting. Apple, of course, is adding Google's Gemini to their Siri. This will be coming out in stages this year. Initially, when Apple let Google do the announcement, the impression that everybody got was that Gemini would be running on Apple's servers in Apple's cloud and not sending stuff up to Google. Maybe that's not the case. Mark Gurman, who is, of course, the number one Apple rumor guy at Bloomberg, says it may in fact be that the chatbot version of Siri will be running on Google's servers. We'll find out. It's in 26.4, which will be coming out before the fall, probably in the summer.

2:28:01Ant Pruitt:And then, of course, 27, which is the new operating server system, which comes out in the fall, will hold the chatbot. so this is going to come out in stages it's not going to come out all at once I wonder how Apple users will respond though to the idea that maybe Google's going to get some of that information I think what percentage of Apple users are good they need to be very clear about they do uh how this is going to run because the whole premise of Apple intelligence specifically Apple in general, but Apple Intelligence was this multi-pronged approach where it could run the model locally very securely, but if it needed to, there was the secure, how did they call it, secure cloud, which was very interesting architecturally.

2:28:57Ant Pruitt:But now, if all of a sudden it's running on Google servers, that changes the proposition entirely. I would think they would not want that to happen. Or maybe they're like, we have our servers at Google's facilities and we handle them. Or I don't know, that's a bit concerning.

2:29:19Leo Laporte:I'm sure Apple has the data on this, of like, what number of Apple users have all their data in Gmail and Google Drive. Right. So like, now the question is, is how many Apple users understand that Google already has all their data, right? So there's some number of people who are like, I love my privacy for my Apple device. Right. I don't want Google to have all of it. By the way, all my data is at Google. Right, we don't understand. It's running in Google anyway. Yeah. No, but that's the principle. My favorite comment is, I don't want all these people to have all of my information. I'm like, oh, what browser do you use?

2:29:52Leo Laporte:Oh, I use Chrome. Right. Okay. Right. What email do you use? Yeah. And what's your email address? Gmail.com. I'm like, oh, I see. Have you ever heard of an app called Ghostry? No. Do you use like Incogni or anything cool like that? What are those? All right. Never mind. Never mind. This argument is over. I'm going to get coffee. Because it's super funny. They have no idea how much stuff just goes out just from everyday browsing if you don't know how to turn those trackers off. And unfortunately, too many people are hands up. Like Patrick said, don't give up, right? Too many people are like, it's too technical.

2:30:26Leo Laporte:I don't want to know. Every time I hear that come out of somebody's mouth, I cringe while they drive a highly technical car. They have all these other devices which are highly technical, but everyone swears to this day, I'm not a tech person. Okay. Yeah. I mean, Apple just really backed themselves into a corner by setting up the expectation that everything was going to stay on device. I get why they did it, but it just was not practical for what people are expecting out of these apps. And like the world has moved on with what, how, especially young people, my daughter all day is like, Hey, chat.

2:31:01Leo Laporte:And then she asks it some complicated question. And she does not think that that, you know, she does not think about her phone. Does it stay code in the cloud? She wants it to, right. It has, you know, she uses notion all day. I had to buy her the business level of notion because she She used to make credits. No, I'm not kidding. Like she uploaded like all her Latin homework, all her like whatever. She uses it to generate. You know what?

2:31:23Ant Pruitt:If your daughter is studying Latin, get her every credit she can. No, absolutely.

2:31:29Leo Laporte:Yeah, yeah.

2:31:29Ant Pruitt:That's great. She must be going to a private school. They're not teaching Latin anymore, are they?

2:31:34Leo Laporte:In public school, they are not. No.

2:31:36Ant Pruitt:I love it. I studied Latin in high school. It was great. It was a huge. Where did you go to high school?

2:31:41Leo Laporte:Yeah.

2:31:42Ant Pruitt:Back east of a small school called Moses Brown. And then Santa Cruz High, where not only we'd not studied Latin, I think mostly we studied surfing and a little bit of that. Yeah. Yeah. But the Latin stayed with me. Ironically, I can't remember anything about the surfing. Wiki, maybe it has to do with other activity. Yeah, there's an explanation there.

2:32:08Ant Pruitt:uh wikipedia worried about uh ai slop getting into the uh into the encyclopedia created a plugin uh a guide to detect ai writing here's how you know it's ai writing which of course it was called humanizer uh actually no they created the model and then an entrepreneur named Siki Chen created a plugin called Humanizer, which feeds Claude the information that Wikipedia came up with, the patterns. Wikipedia editors has listed his chat giveaways to make sure that Claude doesn't do any of that. Chen wrote on X, it's really handy. Wikipedia went and collated a detailed list of signs of AI writing, so much so that you can just tell your LLM not to do that.

2:32:59Leo Laporte:Yeah. It's funny. Grammarly has Humanizer built in. There's another cool writing tool for the Mac called Lex.page. They also have like Humanizers built in. How does it work?

2:33:09Ant Pruitt:Does it, you feel like you're reading human text?

2:33:11Leo Laporte:Well, it just, it kind of, it looks for the standard giveaways, but one that really cracked me up the other day. So my direct. Like Delve or M-dashes or all those. There you go, the M-dash. So my direct, Katie, she's an English major, right? And she's like, I'm so mad that, you know, AI is causing everybody to hate M dashes because like as an English writer, like I use them. I love M dashes. Yes. Yeah. And it's like now you don't want to put them in there because people will claim that even if you did it correctly, people will claim that you did it with AI because there's an M dash. And it's like, no, people that know grammar know how to use them.

2:33:48Leo Laporte:Minion Fogarty. So there you go, Minion. Yeah. You know, like I used to listen to that joint religiously. grammar girl yeah problems and now you know if you do grammar right people think that you're using ai and it's like oh so now i gotta mess it up on purpose this is so weird so uh yeah we argue

2:34:06Ant Pruitt:we argue about this because paris martineau and jeff jarvis who are our hosts on intelligent machines are both journalists who love the m dash and uh you know i'm not giving up my m dash even if people makes it's it's an epidemic on reddit if you use bullet points if you write coherently you're immediately accused of using ai it's pretty funny we need a way to identify humans you know there is no going back to it oh well iris world coin yeah well i mean somebody yes

2:34:40Leo Laporte:sir and somebody who teaches this is a huge problem like do you do you worry about that oh yeah i mean like it's very hard to give a take-home essay anymore like prose assignment uh the law schools move back to like blue books right so like handwriting handwriting like i think they allow you to do a typewriter so it's like hilarious so there's like students will actually buy typewriters now you know really um and then like all you have to do is modify a typewriter

2:35:08Ant Pruitt:to hook it up to an ai and then you're set you're golden maybe somebody should write now some Some colleges, for the essays, they do proctored essays where you write the essay live and download the software.

2:35:20Leo Laporte:Not that the software is unbreakable. It's possible when my son did this that I downloaded the package and dropped it into Ghirdra. Not for him. I didn't help him cheat or anything, but I just took a look and I'm like, oh. Oh, you can do this. The level here is like game DRM, right? And these guys are like 10 levels below game DRM. So if people can beat game DRM, they can beat the, you know. Anthropic actually had a problem. How they do you on a camera to make sure that you're doing the test. So there was a recent test that they're doing, and they have to have the camera on. And I'm like, they can't get up to take a pee.

2:35:55Leo Laporte:They can't do anything. The camera is legit sitting there in a room.

2:35:58Ant Pruitt:And there have been some real complaints about this camera.

2:36:02Leo Laporte:Yeah, and I'm like, hey, listen, I'm a video professional. I could fake that camera. like i know for a fact i can fake that camera like oh yeah i mean just yeah you just get north korean

2:36:12Ant Pruitt:to take your test for you i'm sure and you just sit there going like this yeah actually anthropic used to have a take-home exam for um prospective software engineers and uh because opus got so good it actually did better than the humans so they had to they had to do it something else the original take-home exam was a four-hour exam. Anthropics Claude Opus 4.5 was able to do it in only two hours. So now they've posted the exam on their GitHub so that you can see it and they're not using it anymore. That's pretty funny. Hoisted by their own petard.

2:36:59Leo Laporte:We do an in-person work trial. not cheating because also you want to judge if somebody like gets along with their co-workers

2:37:07Ant Pruitt:yeah you want to watch them do it yeah yeah do you do the big interview question and you have

2:37:12Leo Laporte:them on a whiteboard and no no no we do a work trial so we give them a real problem that's relevant and and we let them use ai right because it's like we use that's part of the job code and so that's part of the job it's not cheating um but you solve it like it so i let my students use ai to actually code, I've just like massively raised the bar of what I expect out of them now, right? It used to be you built this crappy little thing that has no UI. Now I expect it should have a working UI. It should be reactive, right? It should be like beautiful. It should have like beautiful graphs, right? Because it's like, you've got Claude doing it for you.

2:37:45Leo Laporte:And then like in a work trial, what you can do with four hours, five hours during a workday is way up here. So, but yeah, you do that. You have a work trial, you bring people in and then you get lunch. You don't have to ask them a bunch of questions. You're just chilling with them and you try to simulate what a work day looks like. I think that's like what interviews should be like.

2:38:03Ant Pruitt:That's better anyway. It's a much more realistic.

2:38:06Leo Laporte:It's great for them too, because they get the feel of what, like, what's a work day like? What are these people like? You know, what's, and then, you know, they present to the end of the day and you can see they have to explain what happened and you ask them questions. And if they can't explain it, then you're like, oh, Claude did it all. Right. Like, why did you do that? Like, oh, Claude decided to do it. Like, okay, great.

2:38:26Ant Pruitt:was it wrong no that's the right thing i just wonder where where you came from yeah yeah uh let's take a break one last commercial and then we'll put patrick to bed we're going to tuck him in with a few a few uh short stories that are amusing a little amuse-bouche at the end of the show our show it's great to have all three of you thank you for being here i really appreciate it it's uh oh it is i look forward to sundays because i get to hang out with people smart people that i really like and talk about stuff that somewhat matters somewhat it's a little bit the toy store but it it matters a little bit it's not like invading greenland but it's something

2:39:06Ant Pruitt:we have to think about other things once in a while anyway okay this episode of the show brought to you by shopify if you've shopped online chances are you've bought from a business powered by shopify they help my son and my daughter make a living you know that purple shop pay button you see it, check out the one that makes buying so incredibly easy. That's Shopify. And there's a reason so many businesses sell with it because Shopify doesn't just make amazing buying experiences for customers. They're also the experts in helping small businesses grow big. Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command center for your retail business.

2:39:42Ant Pruitt:It brings together in-store and online operations across up to 1 ,000 locations. Imagine being able to guarantee that shopping is always convenient endless aisle shipped to customer buy online pick up in store all made simpler so customers can shop how they want and staff have the tools to close every sale every time and let's face it acquiring new customers is expensive with shopify pos you can keep customers coming back with personalized experiences and first-party data that give marketing teams a competitive edge in fact it's proven based on a report from ey businesses on shopify pos see real results like 22 better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to an 8.9 uplift in sales on average relative to the market set survey stop seeing carts going abandoned and turn those sales into sign up for your one dollar per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash twit go to shopify.com slash twit shopify.com slash twit did we ever talk about the um the uh free tvs that have the ad bar across the bottom telly um

2:40:48Leo Laporte:they these tvs that watch you while you watch they they watch you while you watch they have

2:40:52Ant Pruitt:cameras they have microphones and they have a a little bar not so little a bar below the bottom that you cannot disable that's constantly showing ads while you're watching the big game or whatever. Somebody did a little research and figured out that they are making about$50 per month per customer. Now, this is a$1 ,000 TV. So that means it's going to take them almost two years to make up the cost of delivering the TVs. The only problem is they said they had a quarter million people sign up to get this free TV. They said they hoped to ship a half million devices by june 2023 and millions more in 2024 well according to a report from low pass they only had about 35 000 tvs in people's homes part of the problem is they were using fedex to deliver them and 10 of the tvs delivered were broken arrived broken all including one that they sent to a verge uh reviewer uh back in september uh there it is i think that's broken i think that qualifies uh nevertheless when they get them into homes they make a lot of money and there is apparently the demand uh there are some other issues the verge reporters i'm a roth setter telly showed three of the same ads in spanish which i don't speak in a row uh and there's also uh according to uh uh sharon harding writing for ars technica concerns about the camera and the microphone and what they're using them for would you would you would you take a free tv if if you couldn't disable the ads no none of us would but we can but we can afford to buy a tv that's although i guess to be fair to be fair um tvs and a lot electronics have gotten so cheap they have like you can get a very decent tv from a a discount brand like tcl um for 300 bucks um so i think at some point it's not worth having an actual camera in your you know why you're getting that tv so cheap they're subsidizing it right with of course

2:43:15Leo Laporte:it seems very odd because like yeah what's a television cost these days like not well now Well, they're Android boxes for the most part. And remember this week, Sony and TCL, they went on the date and came back holding hands.

2:43:32Ant Pruitt:Sony says they're going to have all the Bravias that will be made by TCL for me. Yeah, 100%.

2:43:36Leo Laporte:You can get a 50-inch QLED from Costco for$239.

2:43:41Ant Pruitt:So you'd be crazy to get one of these Tellys then. Yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing. That's crazy. But you know that's spying on you just as much as the Telly does. 50 inch.

2:43:54Leo Laporte:Exactly. And so to my point, Leo, the people that are going to that, I shouldn't blanket people, but if you're going to find vulnerable folks, it's going to be not that they can't afford it. It's the priority is this is free. Right. Because I definitely have a member of my family. I have a member of my family who is stuck on anything free just because they grew up in a time where they didn't really have anything. So the idea of getting something free is crazy. We go to a lovely restaurant the other day. And I mean, you know what it is. you go to the entire restaurant and you eat all the free bread and the food comes out and i'm not hungry no more and i'm like why every time why are you eating bread like we got you know what i mean

2:44:32Ant Pruitt:like don't trust no one in our discord chat is saying a good point do advertisers really want the people who want free tvs is that really the customer you're looking for that's brilliant and

2:44:45Leo Laporte:i did like the comment that free food definitely tastes better because it does because you know You ever notice that your other half isn't hungry until you order what you ordered, then they keep stealing your food? Oh, is that why? I couldn't figure that out. Free food tastes better, and well, they're still on the diet. Believe it or not, toilet maker Toto is seeing a little boost in the stock market.

2:45:07Ant Pruitt:Now, these are the guys who make the Japanese toilets. I'm sure you must have these wonderful. Yeah, I do too. Come to my house, bro. Love my Toto. So I ordered one, or actually I told my wife, I said, I want to get one of these Japanese toilets. You know, it sings to you. It opens itself to say, hello. The seat is warm. The seat is warm. It takes care of you at all moments of the operation. And she said, yeah, I don't know. I said, let me just get it in one bathroom and see what you think. Before we were done, we had one in every single bathroom. 100%. Loved them. Like Japanese toilets are a thing that everyone thinks is weird until they've tried it.

2:45:52Ant Pruitt:Until they tried it. I started going to Japan many, many years ago, and I was singing the gospel. Well, believe it or not, Toto makes more than toilets. In order to make those toilets, they had to create an electrostatic chunk. I don't know what it does. but apparently they this is a vital chip making material it's used i guess to hold uh i don't know to hold the wafers or something and they're they're did i say chunk it's a chuck you know you know what a chuck is chuck holds right apparently they are the only source for these chucks and the ramp up in the price of memory has really helped toto demand for electrostatic chucks has gone through the roof so i guess they're experts in ceramics because these are ceramic and uh like the toilets they are ceramic so 42 percent of toto's operating income last year came from electrostatic chucks being sold chuck it in the toilet the memory the memory industry i just i don't know i just tickled me i just thought that was funny how about this i want this that's why everybody likes him that's why we liked it thank you alex stamos sorry we had to let alex go uh short notice but we're going to wrap it up with one last mention and that is of dr gladys west who passed away this week at the age of 95, without her mathematical models, we would not have GPS.

2:47:34Ant Pruitt:And this is a sad case of some of the people who really changed the world are not marked because she was black. She grew up in Virginia in 1930, but worked at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia, started her work in 1956. In the 70s and 80s, she worked on creating accurate models of the Earth's shape based on satellite data. This is from Engadget, a complex task requiring the type of mathematical gymnastics that would make the average person dizzy. Those models became the backbone for GPS. She worked at the Dahlgren Center for 42 years, retiring in 1998. Her work went largely uncelebrated for decades.

2:48:28But we're not

2:48:29Ant Pruitt:going to let her pass unnoticed. Dr. Gladys West, at the age of 95. If you use GPS to get around, you can thank Gladys West. And that is that. Thank you, Doc Rock. You are a champion. Two shows. I get to be Alex right now. Oops. Yes, we're fixing that. Doc Rock is, of course, a wonderful YouTuber. YouTube.com slash Doc Rock. His day job is working as an evangelist for Ecamm, as a man who's speaking the truth to people who use Ecamm.

2:49:10Leo Laporte:Yeah, I basically get to find companies like yourselves and even the hardware companies that we partner with to make it better for everyone, but also to show the users who are starting with nothing, like what the possibilities are. And I tell you, Leo, there's not a week that doesn't go by when people says, well, I'm starting this podcast and I don't know who will listen. I go, that's how they all start. And I tell you right now, I hang out every week on one that's like 20 years old, that's old enough to drink. And there's probably a hundred of us watching it in the beginning, but there's a heck of a lot more now.

2:49:39Leo Laporte:So just start where you start, you know,

2:49:41Ant Pruitt:you never really can tell. Start where you start. That's right. It's great to see you. Appreciate all your contributions. Everybody with a microphone. should get docs pops there you go that's i like the orange one today that's the pop filter uh doc rock where can i get that uh doc pops with two b's at the second part uh that's how you pops dot com it's part of the doc merch the fabulous doc merch lineup there you go pops there it is thank you doctor uh patrick you are a champion it is now 2 a.m 2 0 8 indeed uh thank you for staying up late especially given that you just recovered from the flu i hope you get to bed and get to sleep in a little bit you don't get waking up i'm very much looking forward to it hey patrick beysha is at not patrick.com subscribe to his podcast if you speak French.

2:50:35Ant Pruitt:He has a number of wonderful podcasts for you. If you don't the phileas club is his English language podcast, but this is a tech like you take love rendezvous. Did I say all of those? Oh, well, I mean, I mean, okay. Okay. Sort of well. the rendezvous deck yeah thank you patrick that'll go i appreciate it thank you leo it's great to see always fun thanks to all of you for joining us we do this show every sunday from two to five pacific time that's five to eight eastern 2200 utc you can join us uh of course watch live if you wish on youtube twitch x.com facebook linkedin and kick of course if you're in the club you can join us in the club twit discord that's another place you can watch after the fact on demand versions of the show are available at twit.tv uh there's a youtube channel dedicated to the video and you can subscribe to audio or video in any podcast client if you do leave us a review leave us a good review not a bad review a good review tell the world about this week in tech thank you everybody for joining us we'll see you next time another twit is in the can bye-bye hey everybody it's leo laporte it's the last week to take our annual survey this is so important for us to get to know you better we thank everybody who's already taken the survey and if you're one of the few who has not you have a few days left visit our website twit.tv slash survey 26 and fill it out before january 31st and thank you so much we appreciate it he's amazing

2:52:21Ant Pruitt:Do the twit, baby. Do the twit. All right.

2:52:26Leo Laporte:But what I wanted to tell you, my daughter's studying, is that it's a very good study. It's a semester, a laptop, a book, a software, a hand, a internet. So a master is really cheap. Say her, she can get that back. You mean from the tax? But she doesn't pay. No. Zauberwort, a loss of a contract. She makes it very simple with Visa, and when she then works, it's kaching. That's it? Safe. Visa, a tax. Hol her your money back.

2:52:50Ant Pruitt:Now to try it out!